Dragon in the Night
Aubusson tapestry woven by the Atelier Pinton.
With its bolduc Signed by the artist’s beneficiary, no. 1/6.
Circa 1965.
Matégot, first a decorator and then a creator of objects and furnishings (an activity he gave up in 1959), met François Tabard in 1945, and provided him with 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 multiple international exhibitions (Matégot, like Lurçat before him, was an indefatigable campaigner for tapestry), and 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 he 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 was among those—along with other artists such as Wogensky, Tourlière, or Prassinos—who decisively steered wool toward abstraction, lyrical at first and then geometric in the 1970s, by drawing on various technical aspects of the craft: gradations, beatings, pin-pricks, speckling… The Cartoon expresses the usual contrast between shadow and light, typical of Cartoons from that period; the title, however, gives it a more illustrative value, like a fantastic fire-spouting animal (and fire itself) that scatters the darkness. Bibliography : Cat. Exp. Matégot, Angers, Musée Jean Lurçat et de la Tapisserie Contemporaine, 1990-1991 Patrick Favardin, Mathieu Matégot, Editions Norma, 2014
