They say life begins outside of your comfort zone. While some of us find safety in routine and reclusion, Simone Mattar is a visionary artist who pushes boundaries to create new possibilities resulting in a fascinating contemporary experience.
Mattar lives and works in Sao Paulo, she graduated from FAAP’s School of Arts with a major in Graphic & Industrial Design. Mattar is now specializing in gastroperformances which is a new form of expression. Gastroperformances describes the marriage of different multi-media artistic expression such as film and animation with gastronomy which is the art of food and good eating. As Simone would say, it is “a multisensory experience about many questions that involves the human beings during the act of eating.”
Influenced by the customs of the Arab family, Mattar joins together gastronomy, art and design in a unique way, She first coined the term gastroperformances at the Just Mad Fair in Madrid furthermore her works include Como Penso Como that took place in São Paulo and portrays the various aspects of the Brazilian identity through cooking, Thirty-Five Fragments that was first staged at the Brazilian embassy in Madrid in addition to many other exhibitions.
If you’re feeling slightly confused, rest assured you’re not the only one.
How do people usually react to your performances?
People usually appreciate the aesthetic and they say it’s beautiful but they don’t understand it and this is what I want. I want to push people out of their box. Even in art there are boxes we need to push out from.
For example, I was invited to a conference on gastronomy and it was difficult for some people to understand this harmony that can be achieved. Academic gastronomy is also in a box.
What are the things that inspire you?
David Lynch, for example, combines art and film and I would like to do the same with food. There needs to be a crossing of ideas to give birth to something new. I greatly admire the field of medical research as a creative activity because you are really free to exchange different material to deliver something modern.
What projects are you currently working on?
I’m currently working around the idea of cake and animation. In my previous works like in Thrity-Five Fragments there were projection and 3D mapping; I will use the same concept except with cake.
How do you feel about Lebanon and changing your last name to Mattar?
All my life I didn’t have a relationship with Lebanon as a country. I just had my relations with my family here in Brazil. When I was 21, I decided to change my name. My mother’s last name is Mattar. Her side of the family has artists, musicians and painters and I related to that.
What was strange is that 20 years after changing my name I realized that it wasn’t just because of my family, but because of Lebanon and my Lebanese side. I once went to a grand exhibition and all the pieces I admired turned out to be from Lebanese artists.
