Mathieu Matégot

Mathégot, first a decorator and then a creator of objects and furnishings (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 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 activist for tapestry), responded to numerous 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 was among those—together with other artists such as Wogensky, Tourlière, or Prassinos—who decisively turned wool toward abstraction, lyrical first and then geometric in the 1970s, while exploring different technical aspects of the craft: gradations, beatings, punctures, dotted patterns… « Structure et lumière » has a programmatic value: at the time, Matégot’s tapestries had strong contrasts and sought effects of transparency, like stained-glass windows (cf. »Piège de lumière », « Ombres et lumières »….). As for « structure », it refers indifferently to Matégot’s work as an architect-decorator—whose function is to arrange the space, occupy it, but above all to organize the tapestry’s space itself, regardless of its apparent, disorderly lyrical character. Bibliography : Madeleine Jarry, la Tapisserie art du XXe siècle, Office du Livre, 1974, reproduite n°115 Cat. Exp. Matégot, Angers, Musée Jean Lurçat et de la Tapisserie Contemporaine, 1990-1991, reproduite p.44 Patrick Favardin, Mathieu Matégot, Editions Norma, 2014, reproduite p.335 (avec l’artiste devant lors de l’exposition de 1990)