Ramuntcho Matta — La salle d’attente — Anne Barrault Gallery — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Past: February 26 → March 26, 2011

The waiting room

Ramuntcho Matta is an eclectic artist, who has ploughed and ploughs all kinds of fields. His collaborating with Brion Gysin, the painter, writer and poet, John Cage, the sound artist, Don Cherry, the jazzman, as well as with Elli Medeiros, the singer and actress, has fed Ramuntcho Matta’s artistic and interdisciplinary world.

From paper to sound to video, installation, performance, it defines and connects the art of these various mediums.

For his third solo exhibition in gallery Anne Barrault, Ramuntcho Matta examines a notion which tends to disappear in our society in which everything goes very fast, overconsuming is the rule, everything “now” is essential, waiting. He wonders whether it is topical and valid, when one seems to have forgotten it. What is the definition of the word? Are we confronted with an idea and not with reality? What does it refer to? Isn’t waiting necessary to a well-balanced life?

Ramuntcho Matta puts the visitor into a waiting room. The furniture, the sounds, the drawings, the magazines are mixed in order to create the setting. The wobbly furniture makes you feel uncomfortable, popular songs are reworked, drawings allude to medicine, esoteric cults such as shamanism. The magazines “Middle age” and “Tao teaching“ (the teaching way) are the opposite of the most often frivolous publications to be found in waiting rooms. The spectators must experiment this time/space, in order to bring out ideas, look for knowledge, imagine possibles.

Out of the Latin word attendere “to tend to”, “to be attentive”, the artist is trying to catch the spectator’s attention, to encourage him to look at his environment, to make him become aware of this waiting, in order to change his way of seeing reality.¹ He suggests, he offers him a break, momentary thinking which can be constructive, passive, difficult, destructive at the same time. Passive does not suit Ramuntcho Matta who tries to make use of this moment to take time, the necessary time of waiting, punctuated with events.

“ There are works which do everything in order to wait, to be attentive, not to know ; for which waiting is not only the theme but a way of being”²

¹ Dictionnary Logos, Bordas publishers, 1983, p.167.

² Michael Edwards, In Praise of waiting, T.S. Eliot and Samuel Beckett, Belin publishers, 1996, p.9.