Artist News: Matthew Rose
Fiddle Haus Get Down, 2022, collage on board, 100 x 60 x 2 cm
Fiddle Haus Get Down
In December, a friend brought over a trash bag filled with 100-year old wallpaper recovered from an 80-square meter apartment. He had a job renovating this massive space in Belleville in the north of Paris. The building, about 200 years old, featured high-ceilinged rooms and salons, each with its own wallpaper environment. The job began by stripping off all the paper, and then, once the walls were primed, lay on fresh paint and install new electrical, plumbing, and a complete floor refinishing.
Invented by the Chinese sometime around 100 BC, paper was made from mashed-up rice, then rags. The Chinese began to glue rice paper to their walls around 200 BC, and soon thereafter began to decorate it. In 1675, Frenchman and engraver Jean-Michel Papillon created the first repeating designs using block printing; industrial printing soon followed creating wallpaper as we know and love it today.
Wallpaper slaked a thirst for color in a drab industrial world. It quickly became a décor strategy that was affordable to a burgeoning 19th-century middle class, offering distinct and exotic environments that spelled class for its inhabitants. The colors were alive and the paper was thick – for me a kind of cake I could slice up for my collages.
In the Belleville apartment at least four different wallpapers were layered one atop the other; peeled away with a bit of warm water each coat recounted generations of tenants living in these spaces. Fast forward a hundred years: The skin of faded flowers, red parrots, and a rattan engraving style toile de jouy – repeating patterns of fiddlers or country folks dancing beneath trees or looking out from a wooden cabin – recalled a specific French history. The bourgeoisie developing a new thing: A “lifestyle.”
Once in my studio, I began right away cutting up the trio of musicians – a fiddler, a clarinetist, and a singer. Patching together other images – a cabin, frolickers, trees reaching into the sky, and other bits torn from vintage coloring books, I installed them all under a roof, creating a menagerie of crazy creatures under a paper sky. Then I bewitched them all, giving these characters different heads – animals, fish, or horses – from children’s books; and a secret public life: Fiddle Haus.
Fiddle Haus has become my psychotic musical, an animated trip to a chaotic sometimes evil sing-song underworld. I’ve always loved Bosch and “Get Down,” is my ode to the Netherlandish master of lust, death, insanity, and the surreal extremes of religious belief. My Hades is a touch more gentle, but give me more time and a bit more peeling wallpaper.
The others in the series are Fiddle Haus Concert and Fiddle Haus Fable. I have enough wallpaper for another three big works — should take me through Valentine’s Day.
– Matthew Rose / Paris, France January 2022