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Ignasi Mateo was born in Barcelona in 1966. Although he has made a career as a chemist, he has been interested in the world of art since he was very young. Since 2001 he began experimenting with collage and photomontage, a language that attracts him particularly and where he merges comic books, pop art, surrealism, and many other sources. In the last two years he has exhibited his works in Barcelona (Estoc d’Art, Ca l’Emili and Nau Ivanow).
To relate his work to the space where it is being shown, Ignasi has titled this exhibit “Angst”, a reference to those of his works that, with a touch of humor, point to the paranoid obsessions of our society.
Like a juggler, Ignasi tosses geometric shapes up into the air: cubes and triangles that then fall onto the paper in a perfect order and shape long columns. Shapes on the paper with humor bursting with fury, the obscene, carnivalesque presence of the flesh, the typography of black over white, the enraged look of the chronicler. Scissors in hand, Ignasi cuts up reality in order to reshape it all at once, creating another one governed by very peculiar laws. Peculiar in that they are conceived in an imaginary world belonging only to him and form his particular universe. There we can intuit the traces of the exquisite corpses relished by superrealists, of the object-poem fabricated by Brossa, of the dissonant colors of
Andy Warhol, or the impassionate denunciation of Renau; traces of the horror vacui of Southern Baroque, and of everything that accumulates in our retina and awaits, in darkness, to be born.
In this work there is a communion between the artist’s intention and the chosen technique, between the contents and the container. Ignasi, then, couldn’t have chosen a more fitting technique than collage, which is, in and of itself, the maximum, direct, and literal expression of the desire to shatter reality and invent a new one.