“The World Landscapes Project”

      The main installation takes us back to the vast landscape crossed by a train that brings us nowhere although it seems to bring us to our destination. The artist’s participation is about travelling and exploring remote corners of the Earth through an imaginary train journey. The artist takes the visitors to a new landscape of mountains and valleys and rivers enabling them to make a trip that is never the same. Nevertheless, they can see what is happening around on the big screens that become artificial windows with the projections of
the moving image on the walls. The cameras installed inside the electric train are like eyes recording the forms of the changing landscape during the journey through the mountainous territory. This work changes its meaning each time he does it, because the train also goes across his life and across his art practice with no doubt.

      The artist has brought to life two other installations, which are part of the same narrative, Endless Days (2023) and Circumnavigating Over My Desk (2023). The first one is located on a table where the artist tries to reproduce daytime from wee hours to late evenings employing light to project time on the wall as if it were a physical element one can touch and avoid as a way to stop it from running. And the latter represents the working table of the artist in his studio, with the materials he usually works with. Moreover, the two clocks hanging from the walls are manipulated by the artist to turn them into compasses that show North, South, East and West directions, to make us think about the extension of the planet, as well as of the political, economic and human meanings of the four cardinal points and the relationships that can be established from each end of the world to the other ones.

      The newspapers are time forms themselves, to the extent that they narrate events and are carriers of news that affect all of us. Reading them is a way of travelling too, for they are a symbol of time in our lives. Mateo Maté makes a parody of the union between the landscape and the subject that inhabits it, aware not only of the social construction of the landscape and of its age, but also of the agents that transform a natural landscape into a cultural landscape with its impact on private and public life.

Menene Gras