Notes from Venice
Drawings made with pencil, charcoal, watercolor, and oil on paper.
21 × 15 cm each.
2024
Exhibited at Garance & Marion, Venice, Italy, 2025.
Text by Garance Laporte
We are pleased to welcome the artist Jorge Mato, also known as ca_teter, who is exhibiting for the first time in Venice with the show titled Notes from Venice.
His work is an immersion into the intimate universe of memory and identity. Originally from Montevideo, Uruguay, the artist develops a rich and introspective practice, shaped by the emotions of the transition between childhood and adulthood, and by a constant exploration of the relationship between past and present. His art resonates with deep personal experiences, marked by his family’s emigration during the final moments of the Uruguayan dictatorship. These experiences emerge in his illustrations and books, which are both fragments of his personal story and visual metaphors of universal emotions.
The work of ca_teter, which he himself describes as an ongoing search to express emotional metaphors, finds a particular resonance in dreams and memories, as well as in the dreamlike universe of filmmaker Federico Fellini. Fellini, who would draw his dreams upon waking, seemed to draw from this suspension between reality and imagination to give form to visually intense narratives. In the same way, ca_teter begins his creative process with a simple idea or a triggering memory, often noted in his sketchbooks. This starting point gradually transforms into a series of drawings and symbols that become fragments of a personal, dreamlike world. His drawings capture fleeting moments, memories, sensations, dreams, and visual metaphors, sometimes left incomplete, like a form of intimate graphic diary.
The artist often writes the date and time of each work, thus recording a precise moment of creation in time—a mark between past and present. This simple yet profound gesture evokes the need to remember, to preserve a trace of what defines us.
During his artistic residencies in Angoulême, Guadalajara, and Bilbao in 2024, the artist further explored these themes through the creation of visual poetry and illustrations inspired by his experiences in Europe, and particularly in Venice, where symbols and images seem to merge between the real and the fantastic. His book The Great Race, selected for the White Ravens catalog and awarded in 2021, embodies this poetic and visual approach, where drawing merges with storytelling to create an immersive experience for both the eye and the mind.
For this reason, we invite the public to immerse themselves in this dreamlike world, encouraging them to listen to the artist and to smell his notebook. Indeed, the drawings on display have come from this notebook and have preserved its scent. To complete his approach to memory, we have chosen to highlight smell, hearing, and sight, in order to offer a multisensory experience that immerses visitors in the visual, tactile, and emotional universe of ca_teter.
His work is an invitation to dive into these immaterial territories, to explore the depths of our memory, and to discover its mysteries.
