Sun of Tijuana
« Tapisserie d’Aubusson tissée par les ateliers Pinton d’après le carton de Mathieu Matégot.nbolduc signed.nCirca 1960. »
Matégot, first a decorator, then a 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, as Lurçat before him, was a tireless campaigner for 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 through the 1970s. In 1990, the Matégot Foundation for contemporary tapestry was inaugurated in Bethesda, in the United States. Matégot belonged, along with other artists such as Wogensky, Tourlière or Prassinos, to those who decisively turned wool toward abstraction—lyrical first, then geometric in the 1970s—by exploiting different technical aspects of the craft: gradations, beatings, punctures, stippling… Matégot, if he was indeed an avant-garde decorator, and a well-established creator of furniture and objects, also produced a Woven work that was essentially abstract. But this is not pure abstraction: it is rather the evocation of a place (there will also be “Mindanao”, “Santa Barbara”, …), its climate, achieved through the use of every means offered by tapestry: transparencies, gradations, beatings… Provenance: Fonds de l’Atelier Pinton Bibliography : Cat. Exp. Matégot, Angers, Musée Jean Lurçat et de la Tapisserie Contemporaine, 1990-1991
