Plates Project

Matt Mullican (Santa Monica, 1951)
Commissioned by: IHEID

The American artist Matt Mullican has developed a personal cosmology based on a system of codified signs and colors that enable him to translate into images our relationship to reality and its forms of representation. For the Maison de la paix, he created a project that is deployed via the cafeteria’s dishes. On three sizes of plates, he presents forty distinct pictograms in the five colors characteristic of his work: blue, red, black, yellow and green. Blue represents the mysteries of the unconscious, red subjective and spiritual values, black language, yellow the conscious manifestations of arts and science, and green material reality. As for the iconographic sources of these pictograms, they come from archaic civilizations, personal inventions, or contemporary signage. At every meal, cafeteria users have an opportunity for new surprises according to the combinations of colored motifs they find on their plates.
Article commissioned by P3Art
Notice: Séverine Fromaigeat, translation: Matthew Cunningham