Mateo Tannatt
Sunday, 5 January 2014
Work from his oeuvre.
“Tannatt tends to circle complex political or sociological themes and then deliver works that are open and unstable, never unlocking the problems at their centre. For ‘Rendezvous Vous’, Tannatt reprinted the building’s notice of abandonment but, erasing the central chunk of its text, drew keyholes over it. He also penned a libretto in which one of the homeless men sings about his life. The character was cast, in this dubious entertainment, as a debonair gentleman-vagrant: the photo-collage No. 1 Hit Song(2010) pictures him with a top hat, cane and suit jacket. The title of the sculpture, Casting Call: Vagrant No. 1 (Mattia) (2010), which places a half-dressed mannequin behind a freestanding metal frame, hints at Tannatt’s own forename – he might be projecting more than just theatrical stereotypes.
Throughout Tannatt’s work, we see personal spaces opened up and the realm of the public shown to be a subjective, inconstant mess. He refers to his painted steel structure Konzert (2010) as a ‘plaza sculpture’; it shows a room exploded into an abstraction, a space turned into an object and then into a symbol (particularly in its slight resemblance to a swastika). He is deeply interested in public sculpture by artists such as Clement Meadmore, Mark di Suvero and Alexander Liberman, whose abstract constructions are frequently degraded into logos by civic or commercial interests.
But these sculptures’ straightforward legibility appeals to Tannatt, as does the aesthetic efficiency of advertising. He draws a comparison between advertising and nature, pointing out that a fruit’s skin is the best possible advertisement for its own ripeness. In Untitled (Yellow for Helio) (2011) Tannatt hangs two bananas and a blond wig on a yellow-painted metal frame; the fruit blackens as the exhibition progresses. If only people, he seems to imply, could be so easily read. A related photo-collage, Last Name Bannana [sic] (2011), is a photograph of a woman gazing out of a window shrouded beneath a stream-of-consciousness text that laments, amongst other things, the difficulty of interpersonal communication.” – Frieze Magazine