Mateo
Cabrera
Artist
About Mateo
Mateo Cabrera paints a world where nothing follows the order we know. Animals share the frame with people, dinosaurs turn up beside human beings, and someone might suddenly have the head of a flower. He calls it magical realism or sometimes a quiet surrealism and from Lima he has spent his whole life giving it shape in oil on canvas.
What he is after is to catch something that doesn't fit into words. The mystery and the magic of life, the thing mystics of every age have chased, but told through the languages of art rather than religious or philosophical discourse. The impulse comes from silence and from nature; it takes a wilful shape first, and then, in oil, it settles. It isn't the copy of an imagined reality it's the mark of a way of painting that resembles nothing but itself.
In front of one of his pieces, the first thing that arrives is bewilderment, wonder. Mateo Cabrera isn't hiding a rational message to be decoded; there's a play of images composed by aesthetic instinct, meant to echo somewhere deep. His paintings often tell you something a dramatic scene, almost always with a sense of humor but the story is assembled by whoever is looking, not by him. Each viewer tends to invent their own.
His visual world has something of the stage set about it: dramatic, scenographic scenes, the aesthetic of collage, creatures that appear in no natural catalog. And behind all of it is a very concrete root. Mateo Cabrera began painting as a child in Lima and never stopped; he passed through university and through workshops, through a season in London and another in Florence, and drew as much from the great European masters as from Peruvian culture that blend of European splendor, pre-Hispanic grandeur, and a singular geography. He sees himself in that symbiosis.
Even with all that training, he describes himself as a self-taught rebel, unable to submit to any method and in constant technical search, with that hunger to paint better each time and more his own way. He works from his studio in San Isidro, where he paints and lives. What he protects above all is expressiveness, the authenticity of a way of working that is his and no one else's and though painting is his deepest language, he also writes poetry and makes digital collage.
He connects with people attuned to the visual and the poetic, with those who still let themselves be struck by nature and those after something spiritual as long as they also have a sense of humor: his work, contemporary and free of intellectual pretension, is never hard to take in. And if Mateo Cabrera asks anything of someone discovering his painting for the first time, it is precisely that they not understand it completely. That they never fully grasp it would be ideal, so that they keep some of the enigma with which the world, and everything we see in it, was made.