The Tijuana sun
Aubusson tapestry woven by the Pinton workshops after a cartoon by Mathieu Matégot.
Signed border.
Circa 1960.
Matégot, initially a decorator, then a creator of objects and furniture (an activity he abandoned in 1959), met François Tabard in 1945 and gave him his first cartoons, initially figurative, then soon abstract, from the 1950s onwards. He became a member of the APCT (Association of Tapestry Cartoon Painters) in 1949, participated in numerous international exhibitions (Matégot, like Lurçat before him, would be a tireless advocate of tapestry), responded to numerous public commissions, sometimes monumental (“Rouen”, 85 m2 for the Seine-Maritime prefecture, but also tapestries for Orly, for the Maison de la Radio, for the IMF…) and produced no fewer than 629 cartoons up until the 1970s. In 1990, the Matégot Foundation for Contemporary Tapestry was inaugurated in Bethesda, in the United States. Matégot, along with other artists such as Wogensky, Tourlière or Prassinos, was among those who resolutely oriented wool towards abstraction, lyrical at first, geometric in the 70s, by exploiting different technical aspects of the craft: gradients, beating, stitching, dotting…
Matégot, while an avant-garde decorator and renowned designer of furniture and objects, also produced a body of woven work that is essentially abstract. However, this is not pure abstraction: it is rather the evocation of a place (there will also be “Mindanao”, “Santa Barbara”, etc.), of its atmosphere, through the use of all the techniques available to tapestry: transparencies, gradations, beating, etc
Provenance: Funds from the Pinton workshop
Bibliography:
Cat. Exp. Matégot, Angers, Musée Jean Lurçat et de la Tapisserie Contemporaine, 1990-1991
