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…

If, at that time, Matégot had a very strong interest in aeronautics (his tapestry for Orly in particular dates from 1959, "Cape Canaveral" from 1958…), here it joins his taste for the treatment of great myths: Icarus (there was also "Vulcan", "Daedalus"…), serves as a transition, in an identical treatment (to be compared precisely with "Orly"), to evoke the same conquest of the Air.

Bibliography:
Waldemar Georges, Mathieu Matégot, special issue of Prisme des Arts, 1957
; Matégot Exhibition Catalog, Angers, Musée Jean Lurçat et de la Tapisserie Contemporaine, 1990-1991, reproduced p. 31;
Patrick Favardin, Mathieu Matégot, Editions Norma, 2014