Mathieu Matégot

Matégot, first a decorator, then a creator of objects and furniture (an activity he renounced 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 A.P.C.T. (Association of Painters-Cartoonists of Tapestry) in 1949, participated in numerous international exhibitions (Matégot, like Lurçat before him, was an indefatigable advocate of tapestry), responded to numerous public commissions, sometimes monumental ("Rouen", 85 m2 for the prefecture of Seine-Maritime, but also tapestries for Orly, for the Maison de la Radio, for the IMF...) and produced no less than 629 cartoons until the 1970s. In 1990, the Matégot Foundation for contemporary tapestry was inaugurated in Bethesda, United States. Matégot was part, with other artists like Wogensky, Tourlière or Prassinos, of those who resolutely oriented wool towards abstraction, lyrical at first, geometric in the 1970s, exploiting different technical aspects of the craft: gradations, beatings, stitched, pointillist..

“Structure and Light” has programmatic value: at the time, Matégot's tapestries were highly contrasted and aimed at transparency effects, like stained glass windows (cf. “Light Trap”, “Shadows and Lights”…). As for the “structure”, it refers indifferently to Matégot's work as an architect-decorator, whose function is to arrange space, occupy it, but above all, to organize the very space of the tapestry, notwithstanding its apparent disordered lyricism.

Bibliography:
Madeleine Jarry, Tapestry art of the 20th century, Office du Livre, 1974, reproduced n°115
Cat. Exp. Matégot, Angers, Jean Lurçat Museum and Contemporary Tapestry, 1990-1991, reproduced p.44
Patrick Favardin, Mathieu Matégot, Editions Norma, 2014, reproduced p.335 (with the artist in front during the 1990 exhibition)