Archive

‘The scarecrow is created in the image of man.’ ‘The Dog Years,’ Günther Grass.

Mattia Denisse

OPEN CLASS
NOVEMBER 25TH OF 2025, 9.30AM
ROOM 7 OF EP.1 – ESAD.CR

The thread running through the presentation, the bait to attract ideas, are two phrases. One of them gives the lecture its title and was taken from Günther Grass’s book ‘The Dog Years’: ‘The scarecrow is created in the image of man.’ The other, in the form of a personal note, is a pseudo-question written in the margin of the book: ‘Will scarecrows (not) always have someone to scare?’

Mattia Denisse (Blois, France, 1967) has lived and worked in Portugal since 1999. She practises installation, painting and sculpture, but drawing, writing and book publishing are her favourite activities.
“MD is part of a lineage of artists whose work moves freely between literature and the visual arts. Text and image have exactly the same value and status as elements that collaborate in the task of unveiling his unique cosmogony. The absurdity of the human condition is one of MD’s most important sources of inspiration. Similarly, he is extremely interested in everything that exists and for which there is no complete explanation. Not only because the contradictions and mysteries of existence pique his curiosity, but above all because the absence of explanations gives him the opportunity to infect the rational version of the world with the viruses of fiction and conjecture.