Mateo Maté

Timeless Landscapes

26 juny - 12 set. 2025

This series of works aims to empirically demonstrate a theory born from an intuition. I am attempting to carry out an act of justice—to denounce a silent and malicious theft. I seek to return to art what war has stolen from it. Military camouflage would not exist without the discovery and development of a visual language and iconography particular to pre-Impressionism and Impressionism. These movements stripped all the natural elements of the landscape down to their basic forms and reinterpreted them as impressions of spots and colors, perceived by the human retina in a single glance. From the very moment of that discovery—and proving that no human invention is ever innocuous or free from the risk of perverse application—military uniforms around the world changed radically in concept. They ceased to be merely symbols of representation and power and became offensive, albeit passive, weapons. From that point on, through a basic yet highly sophisticated iconography, uniforms began to imitate the natural environment in which different military units were to be deployed. Artists from across the Western world contributed to the development of both applications of the same invention: Impressionism as the civilian application, and camouflage as the military one. Using the uniforms of various armies around the world, I am trying to recompose and return this iconography to its artistic origins. For every texture, type of terrain, vegetation, or weather phenomenon that might define a landscape in a painting, there exists, within some military force on the planet, a uniform that can serve as the raw material—as if it were a tube of paint. Mateo Maté