Mathieu Matégot

Matégot, first a decorator, then 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, 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 multiple international exhibitions (Matégot, like Lurçat before him, was an untiring champion of tapestry), answered 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 produced 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, together with other artists such as Wogensky, Tourlière or Prassinos, belonged to those who resolutely turned wool towards abstraction—lyrical at first, then geometric in the 1970s—exploiting various technical aspects of the craft: gradations, beatings, pounced effects, dotted details… In these “dormant waters,” Matégot invites us to a familiar contrast in his work between darkness and clarity, glow and obscurity: a luminous abstraction articulated between red, yellow and black—an overall chromatic range that seems far from the title. Bibliographie : Cat. Exp. Matégot, Angers, Musée Jean Lurçat et de la Tapisserie Contemporaine, 1990-1991 Patrick Favardin, Mathieu Matégot, Editions Norma, 2014 Cat. Expo. Lurçat/Matégot, Face à face, Paris, Galerie Chevalier, 2019