Mateo Maté | ABC Cultural | Trompe l'oeil of the memory

June 1, 2019

Mateo Maté (Madrid, 1964) has for years territorialized everyday experience as a way to make visible that cluster of references, events and inertia that compose History and infrahistory, Mateo Maté shed some light on our way of seeing and understanding the world, subordinate to collective memory. Participating in the famous Benjaminian idea that links the action of remembering with the archaeological (the stratigraphic condition where the past is represented), the artist has built a series of mountainous formations based on accumulating pages of newspapers that, although it is impossible to read them, knows that they contain and store a large amount of information, such as Pressed History (in press and imprisoned). When Michel Foucault stopped to consider the emblems hidden in the "trompe l'oeil" of the surrealist René Magritte, he made a distinction between the notions of similarity and resemblance, giving to the similarity a mimetic value, while resemblance, would be guided by more complex conceptual paths. Something of this is found in Mateo Mate's proposal for this exhibition at the Freijo Gallery: if, on the one hand, it plays the illusory representation of orography and landscape as a metaphor, on the other it suggests more critical contents where figure and matter ( mountain and soil, newspapers and information) are fit together to reveal the political subjection that all chronicle-and memory-reaches. The history shown as stacking and amalgam, also as an construction that invites us to reflect on the dubious panorama that determines the limits of our knowledge.