Mathieu Matégot

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, figurative at first, 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…

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

Bibliography:
Madeleine Jarry, Tapestry: 20th Century Art, Office du Livre, 1974, reproduced no. 115
; Matégot Exhibition Catalog, Angers, Musée Jean Lurçat et de la Tapisserie Contemporaine, 1990-1991, reproduced p. 44;
Patrick Favardin, Mathieu Matégot, Editions Norma, 2014, reproduced p. 335 (with the artist in front during the 1990 exhibition)