JEAN LURÇAT / MATHIEU MATÉGOT- FACE TO FACE

For its first thematic exhibition, rue de Bourgogne, from June 17 to 29, the Galerie Chevalier has entrusted the curatorship of the exhibition to Gérard Denizeau,  

Even more enthusiastic than prophetic, Jean Lurçat never ceased, throughout his career, to inscribe the lyricism of his forms and colors in the order of musical time: “The wall tapestry, he liked to repeat, sings the perfume, the drunkenness of the wine, the ivy and the jasmine, the cat and the magpie thief, the eye of the steed, the kite and the hawk, the honey of the milk, and the milk of the clouds, the stinging nettle and the pebble, the wormwood, the thyme…”. Entrusting to the vigilant spectators the care to discover on his colored wool surfaces the echo of all the rumors, peaceful or turbulent, of the world, the great artist continues to offer to his public a mirror which “sees higher than the horizon”.

In deep agreement, according to his own words, with this conception of the work of art as a land of welcome for all the signals – visual as well as sonorous – which mark out, since obscure times, the long chronicle of humanity, Mathieu Matégot postulates with the same vigor the inscription of the textile work in the tormented duration of history. More than twenty years after the death of the great elder of whom he had remained the most unpredictable and least docile disciple, he insists, still and always, on the dramatic power of a textile practice so ideally adapted to the strict requirements of contemporary architecture: “Nothing makes interior architecture sing better than today’s tapestry, no artistic expression lends itself better to the expression of a certain genius of modernity.

To this lyrical dialogue uniting, beyond their personal destinies, these two major artists of the second 20th century, the Chevalier gallery has chosen to give substance by organizing, on its walls, from May 17 to June 29, 2019, the confrontation of some of their most successful achievements. A fertile and conflicting encounter, the source of a strange visual counterpoint, a free play of references and exchanges between two of the most inspired creators of the contemporary textile legend.

Gérard Denizeau