Mateo Maté
Madrid, Spain, 1964
Desubicado, 2003
Installation: Spain bed, alarm clock, photography and video
Dimensions variable
Acquired 2014

Mateo Maté refers to both the canons of art history and the common aspects and objects of daily life, to reflect upon the evolving nature of his surrounding world.

Desubicado is part of a series of works inspired by Voyage autour de ma chambre (A Journey Round My Room), a novel Xavier de Maistre published in 1794, wherein the author, who was under house arrest, decided to let his imagination wander and consider each element of his forced domesticity as a point of touristic interest.

Maté addresses the bedroom as a place of retreat and protection, but also a place of fantasy and desire: a rich mental territory. In Mateo Maté’s bedroom, the bed is reshaped into a map of the Iberian Peninsula, on which the bedsheets become mountain reliefs, while the clock on the night table no longer tells the time, but indicates a direction, further evoking the idea of travel. A photograph presents an overhead view of the artist’s bed he took just after getting up, retouched so as to resemble a topographic map; and a video projected on the wall features him as an explorer wandering through the landscape of his own dreams.