Mateo Maté

Mateo Maté uses ordinary objects, often associated with his own domestic routine, to explore how the spaces we inhabit in late modernity are fraught with tensions and violence, muddling and entangling the private, social, political, existential, individual and collective spheres. Interested in the symbolic potential of the cartographic metaphor, Maté creates sculptural and performative spaces which, though they may look familiar, create a profound sense of unease, seemingly rife with unseen dangers and unsettling enigmas. Through his works, this artist from Madrid suggests that in today’s world, where even our immediate surroundings have become indecipherable territories filled with perils and uncertainties, we need to rethink and reinvent the notion of dwelling, to be able to step outside our field of vision and restore concretion to the spaces and objects around us.

Maté often resorts to irony and seeks the critical involvement of spectators, as well as an element of chance. Mateo Maté’s works explore themes such as the construction of identity, the progressive militarisation of the domestic sphere, the experience of being uprooted, the relationship between art and life, the emergence of video surveillance as a new narrative of contemporaneity, and the internalisation and naturalisation of the apparatuses of power. (Inma Prieto in Prophetia, 2015)