GARANCE MATTON

Garance Matton is a French artist born in 1992. She graduated from the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris in 2017, lives and works in Paris. Figurative and passionate about Italian art, Garance Matton readily evokes the Primitives such as Piero della Francesca as references, as well as Matisse, Hockney or the American painter Ron Kitaj.

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Matton defines her art as « sweet, joyful, bright », Quoting Matisse who declared that the painting had to be « like a good armchair », that it gives relief and brings calm. But the art of Matton, we can see it clearly by looking at her paintings, is also a cosa mentale : geometric and linear compositions, marked by arbitrary elements (sculptures, solitary animals, perspective architectures)  come together to create a surrealist universe.

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In her rigorously composed works, the artist chooses to abandon classical linear perspective in order to multiply points of view. The objects scattered over the terrain of the image underline the artificiality of the space - such as this biomorphic sculpture by Jean Arp reproduced in Soleil, vent, Diego .

In the same way as 60s pop artists (Rotella or Rauschenberg), Matton likes to combine several images in the same painting, as if they were a collage, Le Studio is the perfect example.  Matton's art is as reminiscent of surrealism (Yves Tanguy, Max Ernst or De Chirico) as the digital and virtual world of screens and computers. The colours look real, but they're not so natural: too intense, too blue, too pink, too yellow.

The pure colours, without halftones, illuminated by a radiant and implacable sun evoke not only Matisse and Fauvism but also, in an original way, a moment of great modernity of Florentine painting of the mid-15th century. In the 1990s, art historians redefined a period of Tuscan painting in the mid-15th century as “painting of light”. The rigour of the perspective joins the study of light paths, the chromatic tones become clearer and the forms, rendered through synthetic volumes, measure by their concrete presence the spatial context in which they are inserted. The focus of these experiences is Florence with artists such as Domenico Veneziano, Beato Angelico and Piero della Francesca. Unsurprisingly, in the large format The Studio , a stylised representation of the artist's studio, is a direct tribute to the famous Stories of the True Cross by Piero della Francesca, in Arezzo, with a perspective view of the city.

This light which emphasises volume and perspective was a theological light for the Tuscans of six hundred years ago, for Matton, in the 21st century, it is a light that is both real, Mediterranean, and virtual, purely pictorial.  

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Text by Tancrède Hertzog

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