Mazatlán, Sinaloa, February 1, 2024.- With his work Pareidolia (psychological phenomenon that allows humans to see faces or human figures on any surface or area), Mateo Gutiérrez “MAT” obtained Third Place in the XXIII “Antonio López Sáenz” Biennial Prize for the Fine Arts.
Pareidolia is painted with an infusion of cigarette butts and soot (byproduct of the incomplete combustion of organic materials, carbon) from public transportation on curtain rods.
Minutes after receiving the award, “MAT” explained that his work is a denunciation of the great sufferings of our time, anxiety, depression, loneliness, isolation.
“In this case, a pair of old curtains served as a canvas for me to make a self-portrait where I use a stroke that resists the line on purpose so that the elements within the painting merge into a dense and heavy atmosphere to provoke the sensation in a slow and tedious way to become part of it,” is how Mateo explains it, pointing with his index finger at the aspects of his work Pareidolia.
He adds that the piece uses canvas curtains, which are a good element because they are objects with a lot of symbolic charge of a home of an inner self. Ultimately, these elements accumulate aromas, dust and memories, and the essence of the person who lives inside this home and the curtains are reversed.
“Which means that we are seeing an interior from an exterior, there are at least two individuals involved, the person who lives in the place behind the curtains and the person who is observing from the outside where he believes he recognizes a similar image among all these spots. precarious and dense as dirt and it is recognized in this. I am suffering the same as you in this element with so much burden from home and from your subconscious, it is intended to be a denunciation of capitalism because I used cigarette butts and soot from public transportation,” Mateo emphasizes.
Mateo Gutiérrez, “MAT”, thought of Caravaggio, Dalí and Edward Hopper and also used himself as a model because he could not afford one and it is exhibited in his piece at a precarious moment in his life.
He considers that painting is an essential part of human life and that new technologies enrich it; From his perspective he says that every artist seeks to be unprecedented and novel, but that novelty ends in fashion and fashion is a very precarious form of artistic expression, for him there is more value in being authentic than unprecedented.
