“Mateo Maté uses everyday objects, often even linked to his own domestic routine, to explore how in late modernity the spaces we inhabit are crossed by tensions and violence in which the intimate and the social, the political and the existential, the individual and the collective are intertwined and merged. Being interested in the symbolic potential of the cartographic metaphor, Maté creates sculptural and performative spaces that, while familiar, generate a deep sense of uneasiness, as if they were full of latent dangers, of disturbing enigmas. In his works, the artist from Madrid proposes that in a context like the present one, in which our most immediate surroundings have become indecipherable geographies full of threats and uncertainties, we have to rethink and reinvent the notion of inhabiting, to be able to overflow our gaze and return concreteness to the spaces and objects that surround us. Often, the artist resorts to irony and seeks the critical involvement of the spectators along with a certain presence of chance. Mateo Maté's works address issues such as the construction of identity, the progressive militarization of the domestic sphere, the experience of uprooting, the relationship between art and life, the emergence of video surveillance as a new narrative of contemporaneity or the internalization and naturalization of power devices.”

Text by Imma Prieto

You can find more information about Mateo Maté here