[ENG]
Step into Michèle Matyn’s exhibition hall at Club Solo in Breda, and you’re faced with a moment of uncertainty. The characteristic contrast between the art space and everything outside of it is missing. There are some tables on the pavement outdoors, some cups here and there, a few people having a drink. Similarly, there are some people standing inside, a stretch of cloth has been draped across the room, two young boys are playing, some objects have been placed offhandedly here and there, with the same apparent carelessness as the cups on the tables outside. There’s a brief fade in the line between things ending up someplace by chance and things that are a little odd and different from our daily life. The room inside shows only a subtle shift from the world outside, a shift that sharpens the senses, eventually allowing you to perceive the idiosyncrasy in the details.
This hall is filled with all sorts of objects, scattered across the room freely, but certainly not randomly. A long piece of gleaming, rainbow-coloured cloth suggests a path through the hall passing by a range of things, including a pudding caudron overflowing with popcorn, little petrified tomatoes jutting out of the wall in places, ceramic thimbles that, when tapped together, serve as castanets. On both sides there are enlarged polaroid pictures printed on long strips of paper, showing imposing, mystical-looking, gnarled trees in ghostly colours. The middle of the path is marked by a big, lumpy slide that splits off, creating a Y shape. On one hand, the whole scene could be interpreted as the material traces of a wild outburst or a mysterious gathering that took place here, belonging perhaps to an eccentric cult, with new solemn rituals just around the corner. At the same time, considered separately, all elements, objects, constructions, lengths of rope, pieces of cork, and photographs are very recognisable – just like how you’d come across them in daily life, really. The space itself, the arrangement, is what charges everything with meaning.
Many of Michèle Matyn’s projects are linked to intensive travels to destinations near and far. Her almost nomadic way of life is an essential component of her work. She first made her adventurous journeys and hikes to the most desolate places, in the most extreme conditions, as a tourist – only later did she integrate that habit into her artist’s practice. With an anthropologist’s eye, she trekked from Canada, China and Northern Ossetia to Texas and Lapland, but didn’t skip her homeland Belgium either. As she travels, she observes people, habits, culture, customs, rituals, the landscape, and materials.
Her ‘anthropological’ observations are not scientific. Rather, they are coloured by her intimately personal experience of anything that she finds intruiging that may cross her path: her sensitivity to nature, her fascination for ancient folklore and customs, local myths and legends.
For Matyn, polaroid photography is an important medium, which she uses to record her observations. But unlike with documentary photography, Matyn’s polaroids are more of a reversal of the distant, neutral perspective. The characteristic warm colours and vague blurriness are the result of imperfections and happenstance that comes with the camera’s workings. And it’s this warping – the polaroid’s pictorial poetry – that Matyn embraces.
Observation and registration change in the process, influenced by her participation. She makes no effort whatsoever to distinguish between her personal fascinations, private life and professional work; all three are intricately bound together. Warping and observation are no longer separable components, but form a new whole, a chain of discoveries and interventions.
In 1934, American philosopher, psychologist and pedagogue John Dewey described how the aesthetic form, as captured by visual art, is only a moment of consolidation in a larger process of life: desiring, studying, obtaining and consolidation.
‘The juice expressed by the wine press is what it is because of a prior act, and it is something new and distinctive. It does not merely represent other things. Yet it has something in common with other objects and it is made to appeal to other persons than the one who produced it. A poem and picture present material passed through the alembic of personal experience.
Their material came from the public world and so has qualities in common with the material of other experiences, while the product awakens in other persons new perceptions of meanings of the common world. The oppositions of individual and universal, of subjective and objective (…) have no place in the work of art. Expression as personal act and as objective result are organically connected with each other.’ (1)
This description seems a fitting one for Michèle Matyn’s work and approach. For her Club Solo exhibition, the artist has drawn inspiration from the time she spent with her two young sons in a variety of travels, as she usually does. One of these was a three-month stay in Andalusia, where they lived as a three-member collective. Work, surroundings and (family) life were practically inextricable during this time. The direct physical environment of Andalusian nature and Spanish culture, alongside her daily life that went on throughout all this, all played a significant part in the development of the work. With their Y shape, the age-old cork oaks in the hillside are reminiscent of a figure raising its hands to the sky. At the same time, they form a kind of trinity: where two unite and go on as one, or where one splits off. ‘WhY?’ these trees seemed to ask Matyn. Responding to this question she tried to find answers in a direct interconnection with the material: through the trees, the clay, drawing and photography, and working and living with her sons.
The work is the result of an attitude towards direct surroundings, nature and culture, living together, rebuilding with found materials. The exhibition space is a reflection of this process, with all senses being stimulated. The material study in clay, pudding, fabric, foam is brimming with references, not just to nature and its materials, but also to the Spanish catholic culture with regard to the devotion of Mary. The ritual culture surrounding Our Lady of Sorrows smoothly integrates in the hodgepodge of this space, which even includes local history of the city of Breda.
Move on to the first floor, and this all becomes clear. As she explored the city and its history, Matyn stumbled upon the historic incident from the Eighty Years’ War, when in 1590 Maurice of Nassau managed to recapture Breda from the Spaniards holding the city at the time, using a ruse. As if employing a real Trojan horse, he led a peat barge beyond the city walls, its hull full of soldiers, who were able to overpower the Spanish troops at night. Breda Castle, which garrisoned the Spanish troops, received regular shipments of peat. Arriving so frequently, the ship was no longer checked, and the skipper managed to smuggle the army inside.
It doesn’t seem to be a coincidence that Matyn would be attracted by this story. Peat is a material that physically carries history inside of it. It is formed over a period of hundreds of years from dead plants in swampy marshes, creating layers of several metres. Those were then carved out and dug up. Man and nature left their mark; the soggy material was dried so the soil could be literally burnt for heating, cooking or forging. The first-floor hall is full of brick shells made by Matyn for the absent peat bricks. The original peat bricks formed a sort of imaginary mould for these bricks. The mould is all that’s left after being fired. In this case, the physical shape of the peat determined the shape of the hollow bricks, leaving an imprint, a trace of what once was.
The brick boxes, in turn, brought about new encounters and served as material for new explorations. During another journey Michèle took to Finland, she discovered decades-old, sometimes centuries-old inscriptions in coastal rocks. There were highly detailed, expertly carved signs, including hearts, anchors, dates, and messages in mysterious codes adorning the rocks, giving them the appearance of a petrified torso of a fully tattooed sailor. Were seafarers leaving messages for the ones they loved and missed, or were these the heartfelt cries of the ones left behind? Inspired by the sight, Ewoud and Bernhard, Matyn’s two sons, went to work on the still unhardened clay of the brick shells, which they diligently decorated with drawings and messages of their own, ranging from hair jellyfish to a sunrise, using signs that only seem to carry meaning to those in the know.
The room shows the traces and remains of a continuous process of finding, processing, crafting, interpreting, and migrating, transforming by Matyn and her loved ones. You get a welcome feeling as a visitor, as if you’re invited to join a vibrant environment where Ewoud and Bernhard storm the path disguised as rainbow heroes, eat from the popcorn jar, and build ships out of the bricks when their fancy takes them. This room is about more than a purely physical process. The material, ideas and photographs together create a new, but hard to define significance.
In his plea against the separation of the aesthetic experience from the rest of daily life, John Dewey touches right upon the crux of the experience taking place here: ‘There are meanings that present themselves directly as possession of objects which are experienced. Here there is no need for a code or convention of interpretation; the meaning is as inherent in immediate experience as is that of a flower garden.’ (2)
The matters of the mind, often considered ‘above’ all else, the philosopher says, aren’t purely elevated to another realm, but rather go hand in hand with everyday, earthly, physical matters. To him, the aesthetic, physical experience was a component of a greater process of life, acting as a source that charges more sensual, directly experienced material matters with meaning: ‘There is no limit to the capacity of immediate sensuous experience to absorb into itself meanings and values that in and of themselves would be designated “ideal” and “spiritual”.’ (3)
Y? It’s not a question for Matyn to mull over for too long. She lets herself get carried along with the continuous flow of encountering, appropriating, transforming, and getting distracted again by what crosses her path. ‘We find the answers through the things we make,’ seems to be Matyn’s response.
Notes
1 John Dewey. Art as Experience. The Berkeley Publishing Group, New York, 1934, ed. 2005, p. 86
2 idem, p. 87
3 idem, p. 5
Dyveke Rood