Mateo Gutiérrez is a Brooklyn NY based visual artist born in Geneva Switzerland and raised in Tokyo Japan and the San Francisco Bay Area. He earned his MFA in studio art from UT Austin and his BA in philosophy from UC Berkeley. His work explores themes relating to globalism, empire, colonialism, consumption, identity, violence and media.
Artist Statement
I want to expose the absurdity and cruelty of the underlying violence of American empire, to ignite that conversation, because I don't believe we'll make any progress as a society, even as a species, until we look at it very honestly.
I focus on the traumatic effects resulting from the violence of empire and specifically how that is expressed through bodily gestures. I look at how arms, legs, torsos, hand gestures and facial expressions are similarly positioned, all of these shapes and forms expressing the emotional truth of the contemporary human condition. That's what I care about: emotional trauma, specifically the trans-generational wounds, the deep, subconscious pains of the human condition passed generation to generation as a direct result of the underlying violence imposed upon the human experience in the name of "progress" and "empire". I am specifically exploring the underlying brutality and violence that afflict the participants in modern day extreme capitalism and globalism. I draw my images from a wide variety of online news sources. I then juxtapose these images, forcing contradiction so that we may see what lies behind them; I want to identify and consider the underlying and universal violence of oppression, that which feeds the very machine of empire and perhaps even the very notion of civilization itself.
As a support I use tear-away stabilizer which traditionally functions as a backing for embroidery. I am bringing the back to the front, showing that which supports, that which lies behind. The tear-away stabilizer functions as a symbol of the lives and people directly affected by the "cost" of empire, lives themselves "discarded", "torn-away" and marginalized. I am seeking the reality behind the narrative. I sew the tear-away stabilizer together in pieces, showing the threads on the front instead of hiding them on the back; I expose the thread as symbolic sutures of trauma, wounds that have failed to heal and are, as such, passed along generation to generation. The tear-away stabilizer functions therefore like skin: torn, misshapen by life's wounds, and sewn back together, healing and yet leaving a visible mark for all to see, like the one left upon the heart. I view the tear-away stabilizer as the "body" of my work, as a physical human body with a unique and deeply honest physical tale to tell through its asymmetry and damage.
I use embroidery thread because I have watched my mother, who makes her living sewing, sew my entire life, making our things and fixing people's clothes. Sewing has been a big part of my family since my earliest memories and has a long Latinx tradition in particular that as a Latinx male, who was culturally trained to be machismo, flies in the face of this predisposed caricature of masculinity. I also use embroidery thread because, first, it signifies the psychological frailty of the human condition, that we are emotional creatures first and foremost and as such are deeply traumatized by the often harsh and absurd world that we create around us. Second, embroidery thread signifies the wounds that are passed through the ages from one generation to the next, binding us to often traumatic conditions that may not even be our own, threads of both pain and joy that come to define us, our ways of doing things, how we think, how we feel, how we see the world, how we see each other, and ultimately how we come to both discover and define ourselves.