BIOGRAPHY

Guy Matchoro, is an autodidact artist. Born in Nevers, France, he lives and works in Paris since 1990.

He has practiced alternately or simultaneously a number of aesthetics of contemporary art, from realism to abstraction. The relationship to an imaginary "woven" of memory, focuses its studies.

It is through an approach of the work by using “poor materials” that he finds the medium which will give place to its first personal exhibition, Carnets de voyage, (travel diaries), in Cordoba, Spain, where he finds a “key” lost by its  ancestors five centuries ago and which gives rise to a series of works that he calls envelopments. Not identified pieces of art, envelopments conceal “stones” collected at the time of journeys, symbolic items which reseal an emotion, one moment, a thought.

In spring 1994, he conceives the Rescue Project ©, happening closer to performance. By appointment only, the show takes place in a secret held space, in september in Paris, in the resonance of the genocide which just happens in Rwanda. In an aesthetic minimalist proposal, the Rescue Project ©  is a “mirror” producing of thought,  a magnetic creator of link.

After different events in France and in Japan, the Rescue Project © is back to Paris in the spring of 2012 in memory of the first Fukushima birthday during sustainable development week. When nature is invited downtown - A.C.M. Artists, Creators Moving, mediation Florence Duprey, Paris.

In 1996, he joined Japanese artists of Z+A group, met in Paris, who request him to participate in a major art event in Kyoto : "Without identity without border, to create a space which resounds, to create a human link". He seizes opportunity of making this travel, a plane ticket for a work, but he must leave within the next four days. Arrived at Tokyo at the end of February, a series of unforeseen events affects and disrupts its focus.  Then he unexpectedly finds himself hiking on the roads during the nuclear tests ordered by President Jacques Chirac in the Pacific ; that is why he then decides to prolong its walk untill Hiroshima. Its journey becomes initiatory.

Along the road, he composes a work by attaching the ones to the others the messages, written by the people met on the way, which draws both on a golden book and the human link, length 33 meters (13 inches) ; furthermore, he regularly collects ground on a fabric tape, length 46 meters (18,11 inches), which draws both on symbolic path and the space which resounds.

He becomes member of Z+A, obtains a Residence, Shirakawa Project, and settles in Kyoto in the Art schools district.

At the end of the Residence, he leaves for Thailand. He finds himself in a small village in the North-East, near to the Burmese border. The situation of the Karen people refugees is tragic. Nearly two thousand people were killed in two months, three thousand others driven out, fleeing in the jungle…Without frame, he paints in the urgency, on fabric, scarves found in a bush market, or on its own cut lower pant…

See « In Burma (Myanmar), the life of Karen People have a lesser value compared to the rhinoceroses.» (Interview by E. Tsubono. Kyoto, 1997 April 30th.)

He returns to Japan.

As a special guest, he takes part in Document' art 97 (Kyoto-Project), a project, which connects twelve artists, based around a centenary Japanese wooden traditional residence, promised to destruction. He begins a growing installation, by allowing himself to be guided by an Ariane's Thread named "Mam, Dad, nothingness". The tribute to the old house is moving to an aesthetic grammar and a praise that suggests shade, twilight, lightness, intangible, the blowing of the wind, the brush which traces an ideogram, the enigmatic curve of an eyelid, the silence of a temple,  the ghostly shape, the pithy statement of a haiku*

*The haïku is a small extremely short poem originated in Japan, which says the evanescence of things. In three segments 5-7-5, it is calligraphed on only one vertical line. The haïku must give a concept of season.

Back in Paris, he paints. He focuses its studies following the wake of the universal and tragic memory of the 20th century. A series give place to exhibitions among which the XXVe Autumn Fair of Igny as a special guest. See: MOMENTUM 4'33" - YouTube

Also, in the resonance of wandering, he questions the present mirror of the misfits. See the article in the newspaper Libération entitled :

«Fabrics to immortalize those which sleep outside» by Didier Arnaud.

LIBERATION MONDAY MAY 17th 2010 FIRST ÉDITION N° 9022 - LA VIE RIC-RAC (LIFE JUST ENOUGH)

In 2012, The Rescue Project ©  is coming up again in the resonance of the nuclear accident in Japan. The installation is shown in Paris in the context of Sustainable development week. A.C.M. Artists, Creators Moving, mediation Florence Duprey, Paris.

In 2013, he is back to Nevers, his birthplace, where he set up his workshop.

Guy Matchoro has extended in a highly personal and original way, a long tradition of modern painting, in which the artist's responses are recreated in heightened structures and colours until abstract forms. Matchoro's paintings relate to specific experiences and the process of painting is an act of recollection in the course of which he seeks equivalents in colour and form for his memories and impressions of the scene. He describes his process : " My pictures are finished when the subject comes back. I start out with the subject and naturally I have to remember first of all what it looked like, but it would also perhaps contain a great deal of feeling and sentiment. "

Guy Matchoro - www.matchoro.com  - matchoroguy@ yahoo.fr