Wolfgang Matuschek

Wolfgang Matuschek thought about calling his exhibition “Buildings”, but then didn’t. The idea occurred to him because as a former architecture student, he likes examining the definition of what a building is. What intrinsically defines it. From what point it is considered as being such a thing, in other words a finished architectural product. When taking a closer look, there are elements and details that seem to be deployed infinitely in Matuschek’s drawings: strange, shifting roofs play a major role in the structure of his compositions. In the same way that they very define the form of a building, by punctuating it. An entanglement of levels complexifies even more the way we can seize the images created by Matuschek. To the multitude of confused details, there might be added a sense of the infinite provided by the rigour of a line inherited from the techniques of architectural drawing. This meticulousness displays an extreme sensitivity, as with Hercules Seghers, master engraver and influence of Rembrandt. He used his technical virtuosity in the production of a landscape imagery which never depicted anything tangible but rather a mental image, as in a memory or a dream. In Matuschek’s landscapes, time seems to have been flattened out, urgency has vanished, their utter calmness is disturbing. The sky grows dark in the background of the images and the blast of the wind can be felt: the hanging lamps bend slightly and the composition flickers. A well-informed observer might see here a kind of surrealism tending towards a form of super-naturalism°. What then comes to mind is a late, or neo-post naturalism which seems to have bestraddled the 20th century, and probably the 21st too, to be reborn from the still-warm ashes of humanity’s disappearance. For this exhibition devoid of a title, but which the artist would have liked to call “Buildings”, even the birds, frequent witnesses to his previous drawings’ sweetly apocalyptic scenes, have vanished. Life has clearly given way to depiction. Animals are no longer players in the landscape but vectors of Matuschek’s complexification of plays on mise en abyme. An image in an image, one of his main interests, becomes the central subject of this tondo series. Only a few vaguely anthropomorphic cardboard boxes, left here and there on the shelves of derelict factories, are reminders that mankind was at the origin of this vanished world. But, at the origin, there is also a cartoonish dog which Matuschek has sketched, inspired by his fascination for the creation process of fictional characters. The pencil drawings called Character notes bring to mind mental moodboards made up of screenshots. Printed, randomly thrown away, he then conceives contexts around them: occasional tables, coffee cups or smoking ashtrays constitute the scenery of this brainstorming in which a few famous characters can be recognised: Bunsen and Beaker, or Wile E. Cojote, among others. In this galaxy of fictional icons, Mysterious Pete and his dog, the Hound of Bunkerville, dominate. Exfiltrated from Lyonel Feininger’s comics, The Kin-der-Kids (1906), these disturbing messengers, transported by a cloud, now appear on billboards and no longer seem to have the narrative influence which their American master gave them. The plot also seems to have been lost and replaced by posters and advertising in which Matuschek’s characters lie. Dazing? Or else it’s all a deception and we are being thrown off by the repetition of these images’ mises en abyme while the artist is quite mysteriously concealing the story which is taking place in front of us. °As with Ernst Yohji Jaeger