Claude Mathey, EL Callejon des Loups
Inauguration Saturday, October 7, 2006

 FROM THE PARIS OPERA TO MEXICO

Theatrics! In its more minute and humble form, miniature theatres of life are transported by Parisian set designer and artist, Claude Mathey to her found object collages in her San Miguel debut show, “El Callejón des Loups”.  “They’re fantastically original”, to quote a patron who has pre-purchased a piece from the gallery.

Claude Mathey studied painting, drawing and sculpture at the Victor Hugo School and the Académie des Beaux-Artes in Paris.  It was the theatre, the Paris Opera and the movies that originally called upon her creative talents as a set designer when she was a young woman.  (See her beautiful sets in the 1978 Ariane Mnouchkine movie, Molière.)  Claude dressed the stage for some of Paris’ most spectacular events and shows.  She admits it was a wonderfully creative and fulfilling job, yet tiring and taxing as well.  It was the search for a personal conversation with her audience, outside of the preordained dialogue of drama that led this artist to first immerse herself into expression through sculpture through her studies with one of Paris’ favorite sculptors, René Coutelle at his Paris studio.  Under his tutelage she was inspired to start showing her sculptures at her first individual show at the Salon de Mai in the Grand Palais in Paris.  Realizing she had a real talent for art and appreciating both the artistic and personal freedom to spend more time with her family that working from her home studio afforded her, Claude changed directions back to art.

So, how did Claude make her way to San Miguel de Allende, Mexico from the Paris Opera?  Unlike many other talented people who have retired to Mexico, Claude has moved her working studio to Santa Rosa de Lima, a small town on the outskirts of Guadalajara. One of her sons fell in love with Mexico a few years back and opened a restaurant in Zacatecas.  Claude came to visit him about a year and a half ago from Paris and fell in love with Mexico and its people and decided that it should be her new home.  Through the most serendipitous events she made her way to San Miguel and was inspired by the beautiful galleries and active art scene and decided to add San Miguel to her curriculum of numerous European shows.

Unable to fight off the temptation to draw a point of comparison in this verbal discourse of such a visual expression, Claude’s sculptural works call to mind sculptural works by another French artist, Henri Gaudier-Brzeska or even Brancussi or Epstein.  Her paintings are reminiscent of a more studied, contemporary, feminine Basquiat, light-hearted yet well thought out.  Peter Leventhal notes, “like most French artists, Claude has intellectualized pop culture without demeaning high culture because of it”.  He sees Dubuffet or Marc Caro and Jean-Pierre Jeunot’s fantastical imagination. Best of all, her found objects are the matchboxes, bottle caps and tin cans from her journey through Mexico all magically transformed into some of the most original and works of art. 

Claude & her son at opening.

Claude caught in her own fictional pose.