M. Mate – English

Oktober 24, 2017 by admin Uncategorized 0 comments

MATEO MATÉ: SYMBOL & IDENTITY

The one thing that is immediately striking about the pieces created by Mateo Maté (Madrid, 1964) is his capacity to work with symbols and meanings. Being the good communicator that he is, Maté uses images efficiently in a culture that is saturated with them. Nevertheless, for Maté, there is an essential difference that should be pointed out.

In advertising, the clearer the message, the better. It is synthetic and direct. Yet Maté, as an artist, is interested in the exact opposite: simultaneousness, paradox, enigma, the power of juggling symbols, and the charm of their ambiguity. He is captivated by the symbolical load that even the most ordinary object can contain. According to the artist, “I like to use the residual part of the symbol. The symbolical load of an object that has a direction. I think of it as hitting an object with a tennis racket, sending it off on another course. Actually generating new interpretations, new references. Being able to create new meanings in new contexts.”

Maté’s first works already showed his interest in questioning established meanings an proposing new interpretations, like in those pieces where the object literally represents what is indicated in the title: Del arte de hacer un pájaro y del arte de matarlo (The art of making a bird and the art of killing it, 1994) –a classical hunting scene turned into a bow tie (which in Spanish is called pajarita [little bird])-, or Del arte de hacer un barco y del arte de hundirlo (The art of making a boat and the art of sinking it, 1994), for which he folds the canvas of a painting of a naval battle into paper boat. Maté has also created singular objects, like the Libro sembrado (Sown book, 2001) of “thoughts” –which was in fact sown with pansies, which in Spanish are called pensamientos (toughts).

In other pieces –with a more critical content- Maté turns the stretchers of a frame into cages or labyrinths, using the ambiguous title Trampas de artista (Artist traps, 1997) to openly refer to the situation and the environment of both the artist and art: traps in the commercialisation of the work? Traps in the artistic mediums and languages?Traps in creativity itself? Does the artist lay the traps or is he trapped by them?

As regards his most recent work –which has gained in subtlety and complexity-, Mateo Maté alludes to “hybridisation” to refer to his particular use of symbols, which could be defined by the artist’s capacity to confront symbols at different levels of meaning. This autum, we saw in Vienna Maté’s exhibition Delirios de Grandeza (Delusions of Grandeur, 2005): political maps of Austria inside which one could contemplate the distribution plan of a flat. He used a series of symbols (indicating the service area or the work area, like the system used to indicate different areas in an airport, hotel or museum in our western world) without an emotional load, neutral and comparable symbols, that were integrated in a national political map (an image that immediately generates an emotional an subjective load). Here we find a hybridisation based on symbols corresponding to collective conventions taken to the private arena, and vice versa.

Some of Maté’s other works, like the flags made with pieces of tablecloth, coats of arms made with paella dishes and mops or the economic cooker with a burner shaped like the silhouette of the Iberian Peninsula, present this type of hybridisation of meanings. The universal and the particular, the house-homeland, the flag-tablecloth: private space –my house, my territory, my area of privacy- is hybridised with the public space (represented by a map, a flag –symbols that are the quintessential elements that “construct” the national imagery, attempting to represent collective conventions-), with the different subjective and emotional connotations this can have.

“The domestic, particular, territory, the national territory, the world, global culture. In truth” explains Maté, “I work with very similar symbols, trying to prove the point to which structures can be extrapolated: a domestic fight can be the metaphor of a war for a national cause”. Speaking of war –which is the topic that explains the title of the exhibition Delirios de Grandeza, Maté proposes a series of works in which the ideas of “conflict” and “aggression” are confused –becoming hybrid once again- between the sphere of the public an the private. In a video, the artist presents different images –fragments of commercial films or advertisements- that stage the ceremony of a family banquet and are confused and assimilated with the images showing the preparation and development of a battle. Commonplace tension, the aggressiveness of our daily behaviour and military conflicts, all in the same setting. Heroic actions –praising the homeland, justifying a war, taking pride in a coat of arms or a flag- are represented using the grandiloquence of gestures that only demonstrate their absurd nature…

In a way, Maté’s recent work always contains the issue of space as the territory of identity: the map that pinpoints-indicates locations, the homeland or the war that defends or justifies an invasion, etc. Space “as an anthropological location”, as Marc Augé puts it when speaking of the place where “the identity, the relationships and the history of those who inhabit it are inscribed”, understanding the “non-place as a space for circulation, distribution and communication, in which it is impossible to apprehend the identity, the relationship or the history (…) that are specific to our contemporary age” (M. Augé “Espacio y Alteridad/”La Alteridad”, Revista de Occidente, Madrid, 1994).

This is a very interesting issue which is well worth contemplating at this point in time, a time of “delocalisations” that characterise our contemporaneity. The speed which currently characterises information, goods and capital is producing changes in interpersonal relationships and in the way we perceive identity, the Self and the Other. “Identity goes beyond space”, says Maté, “I consider myself a nomad; I change home, studio, work materials…The only things I retain are my relationships. Thus I set out these routes of relationships with my friends, with my girl, in spaces that are mine, like a table I have eaten on, my bed…These things generate my identity, beyond identities with established borders or national identities…The world I can only understand from my perspective: I am…what I think, what I do or what I read”, like in the series of works Maté created with newspapers he had read an accumulated for years, once again juggling meanings (Medios de formación [Means of formation], ¿Qué hago aquí? [What am I doing here?],1999) or showing the profile of his face as a bookend (Mi perfil cultural [My cultural profile],2001). It is an exploration of one’s subjectivity as the only territory where the relationship with reality can be constructed.

In the series Busco para conocer mi geografía (I am searching to understand my geography, 1999-2002), the folds of the sheets of an unmade bed become mountains when shot with a mini-camera which, installed on a toy train that travels around the bed, subsequently presents blown-up images, simulating plains, high plateaus or hills in a snowy landscape. Maté invites the viewer on a journey visiting an intimate territory, like a bed, or an after-lunch conversation with friends: the camera films the food left on the plate, half empty glasses…An enlarged pack of cigarettes becomes a hoarding that can be seen from the road, a can of beer becomes something like a building, or a factory. Extraordinarily worked images, meticulous to the last detail, with great formal subtlety. The same can be said of the photos of unmade beds that become maps and invite viewers to travel around them with their gaze, the folds of the sheets with different levels that have been calculated and measured exactly as if they were mountains or peaks in a geographical atlas. The bed, the table, the house; spaces and territories that accommodate relationships of friendship, love, desire. Searching for oneself, searching for one’s identity like a journey that explores the closest territories. The artist explains this in a brief text (Me busco y no me encuentro [I’m looking, but I can’t find myself], 2004): sensations are what we have to explore like unknown locations, not the exotic differences travel agency adverts promise.

In the end we never leave ourselves. We are-whether we like it or not- our only travellers. The journey becomes a metaphor where the fascinating aspect is not the arrival, but the journey, during which we discover ourselves. It is, in all, a journey that is “not suitable for tourists”, in which the routes, that are unplanned, mark, as do the experiences in our lives, our relationships with ourselves an with the reality.

Translation: Laura F. Farhall

(Lápiz n° 218 December, 2005)

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