After first seeing Mateo's work at Art Basel, Miami last year, we are very excited to announce Mateo's first ever limited edition print will be an exclusive release with Enter Gallery on Thursday 21st January.
Mateo Wall Painter is the kind of artist that you can’t believe you hadn’t heard of. His art is inspired by his travels across the globe and he’s exhibited all around the world. His work combines ancient mythology and symbolism with contemporary contexts and themes. Imagine intricate kaleidoscopic patterns that would be perfectly at home on Persian crockery, as street art.
Mateo Wall Painter’s Art
It is clear from Mateo’s work that he is a very accomplished artist. His attention to detail and form is faultless, but what he delivers is much more than that. An exuberant love of pattern and colour is present throughout the ornamentation design in his work. Mateo’s ability to appreciate and be inspired by a massive range of cultures gives his work a uniqueness rarely seen.To look at Mateo’s work is to be humbled by our world and all of the wonder that he has felt being inspired by it, distilled into his artworks.
One of the aspects that makes Mateo’s work unique is the way that they feel discovered. By sincerely referencing ancient patterns and iconography, his work builds on strong roots in the past. His work has a mysterious sense of being recovered from some ruins of the past, with something to say about our future. Not content with making visually arresting pieces, Mateo’s work is one that uses the forms of the past to inform our present condition. Tackling themes such as over-consumption, cultural identity and mass culture, his art is something to marvel and meditate upon equally.
Mateo Printed Carpets
Mateo has made a huge impression on the art world with his painted carpets, which have now become iconic. The ornamental carpet originated in the East, the weaving of which was considered strictly women’s work. Mateo chooses to honour and subvert this tradition, as he creates carpets that pay homage to the beauty of women and the carpets themselves are to be hung vertically like canvases. Symbolically the transformation of a carpet into hung artwork represents the rising of women, and exudes empowerment and appreciation. No longer something to be stepped upon, but to be gazed at with awe.
By putting a face onto an ancient pattern, Mateo evokes a sense of curiosity in our consciousness. We crave to understand, but these ancient symbols are somewhat foreign to us. Mateo wills the viewer to connect past what we know, into the unknown. In the process of doing so he questions what our cultural identity has become, whether we’ve become lost in our contemporary consumerism. Ancient philosophy is threaded throughout his body of work in the form of totemic and spiritual symbols, his drive to reconnect with our core humanistic origins.
Mateo Wall Painter from Enter Gallery
Enter Gallery are honoured to be working with Mateo to co-ordinate his very first print release. As a gallery we want to make great art as accessible as possible, and we’re very excited to bring his work to you.
