Mathieu Matégot

Matégot, first a decorator and then the creator of objects and furniture (an activity he gave up in 1959), met François Tabard in 1945 and gave him his first Cartoons, figurative at first and then soon abstract, from the 1950s onward. He became a member of the A.P.C.T. (Association des Peintres-Cartonniers de Tapisserie) in 1949, took part in numerous international exhibitions (Matégot, like Lurçat before him, was an tireless activist for tapestry), responded to many public commissions, sometimes monumental (« Rouen », 85 m2 for the Préfecture of Seine-Maritime, 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 had been part, along with other artists such as Wogensky, Tourlière or Prassinos, of those who decisively steered wool toward abstraction—lyrical at first, geometric in the 1970s—by exploring different technical aspects of the craft: gradations, beatings, stippling, dotted touches… The “camouflage” chromatic range anticipates the artist’s later Cartoons, but the lyrical treatment between shadows and light remains characteristic of the mid-1960s: while the subject (the seabeds) is rare, one finds the usual effects of transparency achieved through subtle gradations within a limited chromatic palette. Bibliography : Waldemar Georges, Mathieu Matégot, numéro spécial Prisme des Arts, 1957 Cat. Exp. Matégot, Angers, Musée Jean Lurçat et de la Tapisserie Contemporaine, 1990-1991 Patrick Favardin, Mathieu Matégot, Editions Norma, 2014