'J’aime chez Charles Matton cette familiarité obsessionnelle qu’il entretient avec les objets, le sentiment de leur évidence, qui est plus qu’un sentiment esthétique, et qui tient de l’exorcisme et de la magie. Faire surgir l’objet, voilà qui est plus important que de le faire signifier.'-- Jean Baudrillard
'In his influential study of the poetic implications of our interactions with buildings and spaces, The Poetics of Space (1958), the French philosopher Gaston Bachelard observed that it is “reasonable to say we ‘read a house’ or ‘read a room’, since both rooms and houses are psychological diagrams that guide writers and poets in their analysis of intimacy.” Bachelard’s interest is in the powerful correspondence between the spaces we live in and our psyches, the ability of rooms and buildings not only to reflect our personalities and imaginations, but to affect them, and the ability of spaces to harbour our most intimate and deeply personal memories: “Of course, thanks to the house, a great many of our memories are housed, and if the house is a bit elaborate, if it has a cellar and a garret, nooks and corridors, our memories have refuges that are all the more clearly delineated. All our lives we come back to them in our daydreams.”
'Bachelard’s observations are useful when understanding the work of the French artist, Charles Matton, (1931 - 2008). Matton made work in many media. A talented draughtsman, he was an illustrator for Esquire and designed sets for films. Throughout his career, he worked in photography, painting, sculpture and film, but it is the remarkable series of boites that he created from 1985 until his death, for which he will be remembered. The boites are small enclosures measuring approximately two cubic feet in which he built miniature replicas of real spaces, ranging from exacting models of the studios of artists such as Courbet, Vermeer and Francis Bacon to intimate bedrooms and bathrooms and the vast book-lined spaces of the New York Club’s Library. Presenting 40 of a total 72 boxes that Matton made during his lifetime, the exhibition provides a comprehensive introduction to the work of a little-known, but strikingly original artist.
'One of the most immediately impressive aspects of Matton’s miniature boxes is their magical or bewitching quality, inviting the viewer into their spaces with a virtuoso technical skill. Through the subtle and precise use of mirrors and lighting effects, Matton is able to create the illusion and the suggestion of spaces much larger or smaller than his two cubic feet enclosures. Inside the box Boulevard Saint Germain (1991), there’s an exacting miniature replica of a Parisian interior, the corner of a room opening onto two half open doors, behind which sit two other rooms and further doors. As you peer into the space, the room creates the illusion of opening outwards in multiple directions into further doors and further rooms. It has a magical, uncanny quality that makes you wipe your eyes in disbelief. You know there’s only this small enclosure, but you lift your head to check anyway, enchanted and bewitched by the realistic but otherworldly quality of what you’re seeing.
'Corridor Library (2000) creates the illusion of an infinitely long corridor lined with books, their tiny spines fastidiously stacked, conveying a sense of great expansion and scope that transcends the work’s miniature scale. In other works, such as Mirrored Cupboard III (1999), Matton makes use of painted glass to give the appearance of a mirrored cupboard door reflecting objects within the room of the box, but which does not reflect anything outside of the box, helping to maintain the illusion of the box’s self-enclosed space. Curator, Joe La Placa, acknowledges Matton’s technical achievements, but believes that his work is distinguished by its content rather than the meticulousness of its form: “With Matton, many people pay attention to the technical aspects of his work, which are extraordinary. But there are many other artists who work in miniature, and it’s what he depicts that is important: moments in time, moods, qualities of light at particular times of day, a certain kind of metaphysical feeling that the boxes exude; that is what makes his work so captivating.”
'Many of his boxes have an extremely personal, emotional and intimate quality. Debussy’s Poisson D’Or (2004) depicts a room with faded wallpaper and a slightly worn oriental carpet. In the centre of the room is a grand piano. Using a video projection, the piano stool is inhabited by a young man playing Debussy. The young man is in fact Matton’s son, shimmering and not quite there in the projection, haunting and beautiful. This box has the atmosphere of a particularly vivid memory; a particularly resonant dream. Matton’s box suggests, as Bachelard also argues, that it is our spatial awareness that most vividly suggests memories.
'Even the boxes without figures seem haunted by intimacy and particular emotional timbres. Matton created a long series of hotel corridors and lobbies. Hotel du Lac (1994) shows a hotel lobby with faded but lavish curtains and a large bookcase. In the middle of the box there’s an open door, through which, with the use of mirrors, Matton creates the effect of a never-ending corridor. The work has a personal basis in Matton’s biography in the sense that Matton grew up in hotels because his father worked as a hotel manager. This was an uncertain time, the occupation, and the family’s hotel was occupied by soldiers during the Second World War. The doorway to infinity, then, suggests an invitation to escape to the world outside the confines of the space. Hotel du Lac has an enchanting, wondrous quality, while also suggesting extreme loneliness and the sensation of being trapped.
'In contrast, many of the boxes exude a playful spirit, suggesting a network of childhood associations such as dolls’ houses, model-making and the surreal, “nonsense” literature of authors such as Lewis Carroll. As La Placa explains: “Matton was a very, very playful character, and that spirit of child’s play is part of the spine of his work.” In order to emphasise this quality, and encourage visitors to enter into this spirit, the exhibition is being held in a specially constructed labyrinth near King’s Cross. The labyrinth will consist of a room within a room. On the outside, the boxes will be displayed alongside preparatory material in a ring around a central room. The central room will contain a large two-way mirror very like the ones used in Matton’s boxes to create the illusion of deep, never-ending space. The experience of walking into the room within a room, then, will approximate the experience of entering into one of Matton’s boxes. As La Placa explains: “Looking through this mirror will hopefully give you the same effect as looking into the boxes, only on a life-scale.” This effect of being inside one of Matton’s boxes is heightened because the inner room will also display a larger-than-life-size sculpture entitled La Grande Lulu (2000), a playful bronze with round cartoonish lines of a woman running, while a miniature version will also be displayed in one of the boxes.
'Many of the works have a dramatic quality, as if they are dioramas or stages on which something is about to play out. In some cases, the drama is well known, but the setting perhaps less so. In Paul Bowles’s Bedroom Tangiers (1998), the particular quality of the light and furniture of the room offers a kind of relic of the dramatic, bohemian life lived within its walls. In other cases, such as Untidy Woman’s Bedroom (1991) and Collector’s Bedroom (2002), the occupiers of the rooms are more anonymous, and part of the enjoyment of these works is in supposing the drama of the rooms’ absent characters.
'Homage to Edward Hopper (2002) portrays a dusty room in an apartment block draped in evening sunlight streaming through half open windows, which borrows and recaptures the sense of empty tension and anticipation that so inhabits Hopper’s paintings. There are cracks and fading marks in the wallpaper. The floorboards are exposed. There is a pile of newspapers in the middle of the floor. It’s a near-empty room, but it’s filled with an atmosphere of foreboding, the viewer can’t fail to be captivated with a sense of drama about to unfold. Propped up against the wall is a canvas painting of the same room; a Hopper painting, just finished, or in progress. Through his masterful manipulation of light and space, Matton almost enables the viewer to feel what compelled Hopper to paint the scene, what atmosphere he felt there that he conveyed in his painting. Hopper is only one of many artists to whom Matton paid homage in his boites. They provide a fascinating document of his influences and concerns. In his miniature versions of the studios of artists such as Alberto Giacometti, Francis Bacon and Vermeer, one can see his recurring interest in scale and in the relation of interior and domestic spaces to the interior spaces of psychology.
'The preparatory materials that will be shown alongside Matton’s boites consist of drawings, paintings, photographs and sculptures and are remarkable artworks in their own right. They occupy a curious relation to Matton’s miniature boxes because the boxes themselves were originally created as preparatory material for large scale realist paintings. He would create meticulous miniature models of rooms and spaces, which he would then photograph, blow up to a large scale and convert into a realist painting on a canvas. At some point while engaged in this process, Matton decided to reverse the order and make the boites the finished artwork, for which he made drawings and photographs as research material. This reversibility of process means that the artworks have a complicated relationship to the idea of a finished piece and to the idea of concrete reality in general. The photographs, drawings, sculptures, models and boxes are intertwined in a complex relational web, in the tangle of which reality dissolves or disappears.
'One of the richest and most interesting aspects of Matton’s work is how in-tune it is with much 20th century French philosophy and cultural theory. His circle of friends included Jean Baudrillard and Paul Virilio, both of whom championed his work. Baudrillard’s writings on Simulacra seem particularly relevant. Baudrillard thought that our contemporary experience is so dominated by images, simulations, replicas and references that we have lost our ability to experience what the images are meant to depict: reality. While Matton’s work makes a concerted effort to approximate reality as closely as possible in the boxes, by the act of doing so they also articulate a drama of the hyper-real, where the distinction between reality and replica blurs. For example, Matton’s meticulous recreation of a particular moment in time in the Nice bedroom of Nobel Prize winning author J.M.G Le Clezio (1999) is more real to the viewer than the actual room, which might never again experience quite the same effect of light shining through half-closed jalousie blinds which is captured in Matton’s box. Once we have seen Matton’s box, that virtually becomes the reality of the space depicted and we lose touch with a sense of what the real space might have been.
'When Alice hit the ground from what seemed like an endless tumble down the rabbit hole, she was first contracted like a telescope, shrinking so that she thinks she might disappear altogether. Shortly afterwards she’s stretched again (like a Giacometti sculpture) so that she thinks she’ll never see her toes. It’s as if her size is refocusing to deal with the strange and uncanny qualities of her surroundings. Enclosures enacts a similar readjustment of focus on the part of the viewer, as if by refocusing our attention on the miniature we’re able to stretch it liberatingly outwards again. At the core of Matton’s work are questions of scale, and part of the triumph of his art is its ability to open up spaces much larger than the everyday spaces we inhabit, in spite of and in fact because of the miniature platform on which he worked.'-- Colin Herd
____
Further
Charles Matton Website
'Charles Matton - Selected Works'
Le Cercle des Amis de Charles Matton
'Charles Matton: Enclosures'
'Architect of Illusions: Charles Matton'
'Charles Matton sort de ses boîtes'
Book: Paul Virilio 'Charles Matton: Enclosures'
'Magic and Miniatures'
'A BRIGITTE BARDOT portrait by Charles Matton'
'Les Boîtes de Charles Matton'
'Charles Matton's exhibition, best ever seen'
____
Extras
Art. Interview pinceau : Charles Matton
Exposition de Charles Matton
Excerpt from Charles Matton's film 'Rembrandt' (1998)
___
Film: Spermula (1979)
'This is the weird, wonderful and highly stylistic film directed and produced by Charles Matton. It is an incredible piece of film fantasy. It is simply outstanding. I am not one to give pompous reviews on any film I happen to see but this film is a major exception. It includes the beauty of 70's supermodel Dayle Haddon,who has modeled for Yves Saint Laurent, Lagerfeld, Max Factor, Estee Lauder, L'Oreal Paris and now a human rights activist and ambassador for womens rights. Back to the film. It is explicit. Many of the scenes feature open sex and unrestrained debauchery. Many film buffs have simply thrown 'Art House Porn' at this film, yet I think it is a little bit more deserving than that. A wacky and interesting plot of extra terrestrial angels on a mission to better humanity with their unique philosophy. Looking at this films history it seems it was quite controversial, for those in the know anyhow. Underground art scenes etc have had their stake on it and many versions and cut and paste originals have been lost. What I believe is remaining are two versions.
'An English version that apparently has been dubbed completely out of context and respect for the plot of the original french version though it too has it's share of meddling, reports are that it was edited and cut beyond belief as there were even more explicit displays, more than you see here so one can only imagine. Rumours are that Eva Ionesco (appears right in the beginning, sitting on the satin chaise and also skipping in silhouette) and her mother were involved in the film which I don't doubt since if you are familiar with the mother's (Irina Ionesco) exceptional work in photography and styling, known for her dark, poignant, erotic, unsettling yet beautiful imagery you will no doubt see also in this film which swings from the period Baroque/Rococo to 1930's ART DECO. The styling(Alberte Barsacq) is absolutely elegant, a word I use sparingly. The soundtrack is stunning, beautifully elegant piano arrangements, Cabaret tunes, some Disco is thrown in and 1930s jazz bands. What sets this film so apart from most films of this underground variety is that the film in general is highly stylised, stylised to the point that I think to myself 'Only in the 70s', only in the 70s when permissiveness was much greater, Disco was everywhere and interior design and Fashion were at its peak that such a film could be made and incorporate some of those abstract themes and in general plain weirdness together to create something so exceptional. I sometimes think to myself people made films so bizarre like this just so that in the future, we could write, talk and mold over how and why such a film was created. Art for arts sake? or Avant Garde pretentiousness? Nevertheless the film warrants intense investigation and understanding, for out of all the zany, wacked, ART HOUSE, underground, B grade, softcore, hardcore films made during this wonderful era, Spermula remains a lost gem. Too unique to be ignored.'-- GABRIEL ANTINOUS
___
Wall works
'A virtuoso in all of the visual arts (painter, designer, sculptor, photographer and film director), Charles Matton nonetheless recognised the specificity, limits, borders of each medium. He said that his visual research consisted of passing one art form to another, crossing borders like a smuggler, “encircling” his subjects, never giving special preference to any particular medium, yet aware of the capacities of each.'-- 5000 Photographs
LE SEIN DANS LES NUAGES, 1982
Chaise Longue Rose, 1978
PEINTURES SUR LE REEL, 1984
MUR D'UN DESSINATEUR CONTEMPORAIN, 1978
Sylvie from an angle, 1989
Couple faisant l'amour sous les draps, 1974
Jules bascule Sylvie se précipite, 1972
GRANDE LULU, 1998
Girl, 1950
DESSINS CLASSIQUES, 1991
___
Boxes
The New York Loft, 26th Street (1986)
Boulevard Saint Germain (3 doors) (1991)
Boulevard St Germain
Sigmund Freud's Study (Night) (2002)
A Romantic Collector's Bedroom (2002)
Francis Bacon's Studio (1987)
Chambre de William Burroughs, Tangier (2004)
Le loft au grand escalier (1989)
Library (Homage to Proust)
Bathroom II (1987)
Petit matin au Café de Flore
The Secret Garden of Marianne and Pierre Naho (1933)
The Green Living Room With Two Armchairs (1987)
Paramount Theater Aucland (1989)
*
p.s. Hey. ** Jamie McMorrow, Top of the morning to you, Jamie. Ah, from the Gaelic, that makes sense. 'Slope' is a really nice word. I'm going to remember to use it more often. Thanks! Yeah, I was going to do a little subsection of that post about the band Harry Crews, but then I thought it might be too offsite or something. I should've. Teenage Jesus and the Jerks were/are pretty fucking great, I agree with you entirely. My Tuesday ... oh, the gift thing worked out well. It's going to sound kind of, I don't know, silly maybe, but there's this place in Paris called Charvet, and it's the oldest and last surviving store in France where you can have a shirt custom made for you entirely to your specifications including style, cool, fabrics, etc., from scratch, and, on a whim, I decided to give Zac that, and, luckily, he was into it. So we went to Charvet and they spent a couple of hours measuring him and picking out basic things like the types of cuffs, collar, buttons, etc. that he wants. Now they'll make a prototype, and then he'll go back and, if it's to his satisfaction, he will pick out the color and fabric and so on, and then they'll make the shirt. It was old fashioned fun. Otherwise, I worked. There was a stress mess with the people handling 'Like Cattle Like Glow' that had to be resolved, but it's just non-stop headaches with them, so that was nothing new. I saw the new, just about to be released Christophe Honore film 'Les Malheurs de Sophie'. He'd warned me that was a commercial film for kids, but it was actually very strange and dark and good. After that, it was bedtime. Tuesday was mostly good. Your Tuesday sound like it was going to be most excellent. Were you happy with the music you made and the transcribing you did? And which way did the parental dinner tip?
** David Ehrenstein, He kind of is, no? ** Andrew Durbin, Hi, Andrew! It's really nice to see you! I would love to talk with you about Arnold Fern, and I'm completely thrilled to hear that you're doing research on him. I love his work, and he and I were very close friends and even roommates for a while. So, yes, I would love to talk with you about him. Here's my email: dcooperweb@gmail.com. Maybe send me a mail, and we can figure out a good time to talk. That's great and heartening news! Thank you! ** Steevee, Hi. I can only imagine. I've had to do that a few times when I was doing journalism, and I don't think I ever had a successful bite on a pitch. And I have to do what is essentially a drawn out, elaborated pitch with Zac's and my films, and the TV series project, and so on. There are few things I like to do less. I totally agree with you that the first Specials album is a masterpiece. It's an incredibly great and kind of perfect record. Their second album is pretty disappointing. I've read that they too think it was a downswing and was recorded in too much of a rush. The 'Ghost Town' EP is nice. But they never reached the heights of that first album again. They were incredible live at that point, as I'm sure you can imagine. I agree with you about that English Beat album too. Again, they slid after that, although a couple of those later, semi-post-ska singles aren't too bad. I like The Selecter. I don't find that their records hold up as well, but Pauline Black was an amazing front person. I never could stand Madness, and I still can't. It just seemed like overly cozy novelty stuff to me. I feel like Ska Punk really peaked in that 2 Tone era, and that there weren't a lot of other particularly good bands. There are those who prop the so-called 'Third Wave' bands like Mighty Mighty Bosstones and Aquabats and so on, but I thought that stuff was too cutesy and watered down. If you find anything particularly interesting, let me know. ** Dóra Grőber, Hi, Dóra! Definitely, definitely about what you said about zines and zine-makers. Maybe even kind of more so these days when the choice to make a zine rather than just put stuff up on the web is an even more impassioned one. I like working on the TV show, yeah. It's new to me to have to write something creative on assignment for a situation where there are all these heavy rules about what's commercial or accessible and conventionally entertaining and so on. So far, it's just interesting. We'll see what it's like if ARTE really wants us to neuter our ideas. But, for now, it's a bit like playing and trying to win a game or something. Thank you for getting 'Period'. That's cool! I just told Jamie about my day up above. It was pretty good other than a few hours of stress shit in the middle. How did Wednesday work out for you? ** _Black_Acrylic, I am indeed always looking for that unmistakable excuse to just buy a turntable. Maybe this is that. I will telegraph all of my long distance faith into Andrew's pledge and start tentatively getting excited. ** Postitbreakup, Hi, Josh! Oh, um, well, Gisele and I made this new theater piece, 'The Ventriloquists Convention', that's been kind of a big hit. And we got an idea to do a TV series featuring two of the characters. Some people from the big French/German TV channel ARTE saw and really loved 'TVC', so Gisele decided to go ahead with the idea, and we hooked up with a TV producer to handle the project, and Gisele asked Zac and me to write it. The producer told us to make it a three-episode series because that form is very trendy and wanted over here right now for some reason. So we wrote one episode and part of the second episode on spec. The producer took that to ARTE and they liked it with certain qualifications. They made a bunch of suggestions and said they will consider the series if we agree with their suggestions and can get them two completed episodes, a detailed synopsis for a third episode, and an overall synopsis and statement of intent/pitch by the end of April. Their suggestions were doable, so we're going for it. If they like the package, they'll give us development money to finish the script and start deciding on cast, location, etc., and then they will decide if they're going to produce/broadcast the series or not. There are three episodes, each about 50 minutes long. There are no commercial interruptions on ARTE, so each episode would literally be fifty or so minutes. I don't know if the script format is the same here. This is the first time I've ever actually written a formally correct, professional script. Oh, well, you should go for it. It's a very interesting process. I don't know how different the process is here vs. in the US, especially now that cable is where things are happening, but I'm imagining that with cable, Netflix, Amazon and so on doing series, there must be something like the greater creative freedom that European television allows in the US now? I'm happy to say more about all of that, if you like. Good to see you, Josh. ** Chris Dankland, Hi, Chris. Cool, I'm glad the post was insinuating, of course. Thanks a lot, man! Happy Wednesday! What happened of note betwixt morn and midnight? ** Misanthrope, Intense looking fella, yeah. Yeah, taxes, I'm just in a bit of a pickle with mine due to utter laziness in recent years, and so I'm having to jump through many hoops to pay mine this year, which is what inspired my little sequence of theatricalities. ** James, Hi there. I'm glad you, of all people, liked the post, since it would ne'er have existed sans you. Yeah, rough childhood for motherfucking sure. Thanks again, buddy. ** Okay. As was the case with yesterday's post, today's post is partly owed to a fine d.l., in this case Bill, who introduced me to Mr. Matton's stuff not two weeks ago -- a meeting that occasioned my idea to share what I found. Henceforth, enjoy. See you tomorrow.