Flame
« La flammenTapisserie de Portalegre tissée par l’atelier Fino.nAvec son bolduc signed de l’artiste, n°2/6.nCirca 1965. »
Matégot, first a decorator, then the creator of objects and furnishings (an activity he abandoned in 1959), met François Tabard in 1945 and gave him his first Cartoons, first figurative, 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, as Lurçat before him, would prove to be an indefatigable campaigner for tapestry), responded to many 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 created no fewer than 629 Cartoons up to the 1970s. In 1990, the Matégot Foundation for Contemporary Tapestry was inaugurated in Bethesda, in the United States. Matégot was among those—along with other artists such as Wogensky, Tourlière or Prassinos—who would decisively steer wool toward abstraction, lyrical at first and then geometric in the 1970s, by exploiting various technical aspects of the craft: gradations, beatings, punctuings, stipplings… Characteristic abstract Cartoon by the artist in the mid-1960s: the evocation of flame, stylized into an aggressive violet, points to Matégot’s interest in industry and technique, but also to the play of woven transparencies, of which he became the leading proponent. Bibliography : Cat. Exp. Matégot, Angers, Musée Jean Lurçat et de la Tapisserie Contemporaine, 1990-1991
