Tall tales: Small wonder

In a dimly lit music room, a ghostly figure sits at a grand piano. A brass chandelier casts shadows around him, an intricate Persian rug covers the floor and a landscape painting hangs on one wall. The pianist starts to play Debussy's 'Poisson d'Or', his fingers running fluidly across the keys. He is Jules Matton, musician and the son of the late French artist Charles Matton. But this is not a live performance, Jules is merely a projected image, no more than eight inches tall, playing in a miniature, minutely detailed room - a '

But this boite was no one-off: thirty-eight of these boxes, which had lain undiscovered at his Paris home until after he died in 2008, are to go on display at All Visual Arts' new Matton exhibition, Enclosures. Each box is expected to sell for upwards of £60,000.

Born in Paris in 1931, Matton was a creative polymath: painter, photographer, draughtsman, writer, filmmaker, sculptor. Inspired and influenced by artists from Vermeer to Bacon, his focus was the everyday, the ordinary; things considered unworthy of attention by loftier artists. He was endlessly fascinated by the smallest details - the folds in a dropped cloth, how a change in the light alters the feel of a room, and mundane personal objects.

His boites started out as practical devices to allow him to photograph and paint an environment in which everything from the fall of a shadow to the shade of the walls could be minutely altered as he desired. But they gradually developed into exquisite works in their own right, with every detail - a broken lightswitch, fading wallpaper, discarded paintbrushes, crumpled Air Mail letters, and exact miniatures of his own paintings (often painted full-scale first, especially) - painstakingly realised in 1:7 scale.

Some are precise replicas of real spaces - Bacon and Vermeer's studios; Sigmund Freud's study; the Cafe Flore in Paris in the early hours of the morning. Some are remembered - his New York loft studio, empty hotel corridors, the hospital delivery room where one of his sons was born. Others still are imagined - the bedroom of a romantic art collector, a rhinocerous sculptor's studio, the attic of Leopold von Sacher-Masoch III. But real or imagined, Matton's approach never differed: 'Invent nothing, attest to the place, make it reappear... make all that exist again, forever.'
Enclosures runs 9 September-7 October at AVA, 2 Omega Place, N1 (allvisualarts.org)