Gallery Anne Barrault is pleased to present a new exhibition of Ramuntcho Matta entitled «Notre Pain Quotidien».
The artist puns on the word «pain» which has quite a different meaning in French and in English (pain in French is Bread in English, whereas pain in English is souffrance in French). The title echoes our daily bread as well as our daily pain, which make us grow up.
As Philippe Ducat puts it: “Ramuntcho Matta is both a musician and a plastic artist. He shares his time equally between these two activities. His love for “haiku” is reflected in his drawings and his musical compositions.
Everything is improvised: it is scathing and above all quite invigorating. It is an excellent technique in order to keep awake, not to miss the flashes of inspiration”.
For the last four years now, every morning, like a daily exercise, a ritual, a meditation, Ramuntcho Matta has done a drawing.
Every morning he logs onto Facebook and sends his drawing with a sentence, as you throw a bottle in the sea.
From among the thousands of images on this network, every morning, a drawing of Ramuntcho Matta emerges.
Very often internauts write in turn and add their own sentences to the drawing of the day. Sometimes the messages are public, but most of the time, they are sent directly to Ramuntcho Matta (private access).
Encounter is Ramuntcho Matta’s main theme. Whether he plays music, or sends us his drawings, what matters for him is his neighbor, and what this encounter will give birth to: hence the phrase he is fond of 1+1=3.
Here is what Maurice Benhamou writes about Ramuntcho Matta’s work :
“As if he wanted to express what is inexpressible, Ramuntcho Matta releases, on paper or canvass, shapeless, sensitive, intuitive, conceptless splashes of colors, which drift, gather: it is analogical.
It is only then, contrary to the usually specific chronology of any painting, when he creates articulated, digital shapes, lively, nervous, no longer intuitive but imaginative and spontaneous shapes.
The shapeless chromatic splashes have, whatever you do, outlines, accidents. Therefore it is the canvass itself that proposes and stimulates imagination.
If the first, colorful waves had demanded slow meditations, the digital forms germinate at once on the smallest variations of the colored patches, lively and nearly subconscious. They are the fruit of a tense and hasty dialog between each other.
The nearly electric contact with what is shapeless and imaginary echoes the unpredictable vision the artist is moved to see appear already made from his hands.
This echo method gives birth to an open creation. The surface, what is seen keep the initiative. The work gives a feeling of suspense, of living balance and you never tire of it.”
Maurice Benhamou
July 2018
To note !
On the occasion of the exhibition, a book entitled «les dess(e)ins du jour» by Ramuntcho Matta, published by the
galerie anne barrault and distributed by Presses du Réel, will be released in October 2018.