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Roberto Matta, Architect of Surrealism

Roberto Matta was undoubtably an inexhaustible torrent of ideas that
he turned into images. In his work he developed multiple and coherent
visions with an indefatigable curiosity, in every media available to him, from painting to sculpture, drawing, and graphic work.  His work was always an attempt to bring reason to a world without borders.  Since very early in his life Matta chose to just use his last name, without the surname, gestures, attributes or appellations, so we will continue to address him like this.  Matta was a creative genius, a mathematical architect of the cosmos, a writer of images, and an abstract as well as figurative
surrealist in his interpretation of human energy.  He was an idealistic
thinker, a chronicler of the realities of the twentieth Century, a philosopher of
the imprecise, a writer, a mathematician, an astronomer and a poet.

It is an almost impossible task to refer to the infinite facets of an
endless character such as Matta.   I will turn to the
Octavio Paz poem, “The House of Glances (For Roberto Matta)” where the
Mexican writer describes him:

You are in the house of glances, the mirrors have hidden all their ghosts,
  there's nobody there and there's nothing to see, things have abandoned
their
bodies,
  they are not things, they're not ideas: they're shots of green and red and
yellow and
blue,
  swarms turning and turning, spirals of fleshless legions,
  a whirlwind of forms that still have yet to find their form,
  your glance is the propeller that spins and drives the ghostly mobs,
  your glance is the fixed idea that drills through time, the motionless
statue
in the plaza of
insomnia,
  your glance weaves and unweaves the threads of the fabric of space,
  your glance rubs one idea against another and lights a lamp in the church
of
your skull,
  a passage from enunciation to the annunciation, from conception to the
assumption,
  your eye is a hand, your hand has five eyes, your glance has two hands,
  we are in the house of glances and there's nothing to see, we must
repopulate
the house
of the eye,
  we must populate the world with eyes, we must be loyal to sight, we must
         CREATE IN ORDER TO SEE.

  The fixed idea drills through each minute, thought weaves and unweaves the
fabric,
  you come and go between the infinity outside and your own infinity,
  you are a thread of the fabric and a pulse-beat of the minute, the eye
that
drills and the
weaver eye,
  entering yourself you're not leaving the world, there are rivers and
volcanoes
inside your
body, planets and ants,
  empires, turbines, libraries, gardens sail through your blood,
  there are animals, plants, beings from other worlds, galaxies wheel
through
your
neurons,
  entering yourself you enter this world and the other worlds,
  you enter what the astronomer saw in his telescope, the mathematician in
his
equations:
  disorder and symmetry, accidents and rhymes, duplications and mutations,
  the St. Vitus dance of the atom and its particles, the cells reproducing,
the
stellar
inscriptions.

(From “The Collected Poems 1957-1087, ” translated by Eliot Weinberger, published by New Directions).

This brief introductory essay attempts to summarize the
creative genesis of this architect of space and creator of a unique language, Matta.

He was born on the 11th of November 1911.  This numeric coincidence
allowed him to assume that his entry into the world was marked by a mythical
Cabbala, and with the same intransigent will that he lived, he died on
November 23, not far from his birthday.  He was a creative genius, an architect of images, a polyglot world traveler, a navigator of the cosmos, and a strong-voiced narrator of his intransigent ideas that were uncomfortable for many to deal with.  Without a doubt, and above all, he told his truth.

 In 1935 Matta met Federico García Lorca in Madrid.  He was impressed by and interested in the Spanish poet’s rejection of formalism in art and literature, which García Lorca practiced in his exaggerated metaphors and his imaginative illustrations.  That same year, Matta arrived in Paris to work as an architect in Le Corbusier’s workshop.  He stayed only three years in that architect’s Olympus because he was already committed to his personal ideals of a mathematical abstraction, first proposed by Man Ray and based on the algebraic modules that the mathematician Jules Henri Poincaré had published in the Cahiers d’Art.  In Paris he also met Dalí, Gordon Onslow Ford, and  Picasso, when he was painting Guernica.

The first path he took in his life was architecture, which he studied at the
Universidad Católica in Santiago de Chile, the city of his birth.  Little by little he began to aim for a stroke and a painting style that at first conveyed an anti-religious feeling.  He had been working on this issue since his university thesis where he proposed building an ecumenical temple for all religions.  He molded this same feeling along with
metaphysical ideas, and the order/chaos project into his creations. His artistic work seems to always oscillate between the metaphysical abstract and the figurative.

Matta continued the search for the energetic extensions that were found in
the microcosms as well as in the macrocosms.  From very early on we find the
pendulums that Matta’s work oscillates between: the concept of a multiple time
where past and future are come together in a single present and the creation
of spaces of unique perspectives with multiples points of escape and
explosive morphologies.

Already in 1938, André Breton, the father of Surrealism, described the
precocious achievements of Matta in the magazine “The Minotaur,” written when he participated in the International Surrealist Exposition: “He invites us to enter a new
space that he has deliberately broken.  And in this new way of seeing and
showing the images he is supported by psychology, morphology,
historiography and in the concepts of nuclear physics”.

Matta was at that time seeking to give a personal interpretation of the
threshold between the conscious and the unconscious that he called
”psychological morphology”.  As a part of this project he develops the
description of an alternative venture with spaces and times of its own. He
adapted the concept of automatism proposed by Duchamp, Miró and Tanguy to
introduce automatic writing into his work and through it he liberated
himself from the mediation of reason and granted speed to the line. Bioforms
in continuous movement appear in his lexicon.  They are the extension of the
organic world always finding a space that breaks with the underlying
conventions of background and form (first and second plane) and becomes the
architect of their own space in the second plane.  A bit later the theme of
the gestation, the birth and death of a star, begins to appear in his work.

During the Second World War Matta emigrates with his surrealist friends to New
York.  He quickly established contact with the young North American painters
whom he greatly influenced with his tenacious persistence and the credo of
automatic writing.  His frottage technique was a big influence on what we
know today as the New York School, the North American Abstract
Expressionism.

His meteoric rise as an artist can be seen in his New York beginning: he was
represented by the Pierre Matisse gallery the first year that he arrived,
and later by Sweendy James, the most progressive gallery of its time where
he showed with the best North American artists.  He showed at the Museum of
Modern Art in New York as early as 1957.  That fact allows us to gage the
extent to which his work was well received and the ample worldwide
recognition he enjoyed.  Even so, he denied his whole life that he was a
successful man.

Sydney Simon asked Peter Busa in an interview about the beginnings of the
New York School (1939-1943).  They discuss the enormous influence Matta had on the birth of the expressionist movement itself when he put forward the surrealist
theory of automatism as a way to begin inner emancipation.  In a separate
interview covering the same topic, Robert Motherwell says, “The only
Surrealist that I knew well was Matta.  He was the most energetic,
enthusiastic, charming, brilliant poet and young artist that I met in the
spring of 1941.  One must recognize that no one in the group had achieved
Matta’s recognition and fame.  He was such an enthusiastic and extremely
important person to the movement.  His guiding spirit was a catalyst”.  
Motherwell pointed out that even though what he liked was color “Matta’s
pencil drawings of the thirties and forties were the most beautiful works
made in America at the time”.

Nicolas Calas states that Matta made the transition from Surrealism to
Abstract Expressionism.  He became the latent muse of the unconscious.  
Matta intelligently replaced the microcosm with his unreachable macrocosm.

En 1949 the concept of the open cube appears.  He had begun investigating
this form since 1942 and wanted to shape a multiple space with a two-dimensional
surface.  Totems, myths and taboos, constants in his work, start to appear
in the sixties.  We see how Matta changes visual equivalences and that he
proposes a step beyond where he breaks with all visual outlines.  There are
painting’s two dimensions, the physical world’s third dimension, time’s
fourth dimension and the fifth where conscious acts reside.
Matta was an artist committed to the realities of the world.  He denounces
the atrocities of war as Goya did in his time; he paraphrases Saramago
affirming that cruelty is the worst invention of human beings.  Matta
observes the violence of the world; the tyranny of rulers and the injustices
multiplied throughout the planet and includes a tragic and dramatic element
in many of his works. His commitment to reality forced him to forever bear caustic witness to world events.
 
 
Marta Traba wrote of Matta:

“The greatest Latin-American Surrealist and one of the greatest in the world,
Matta has been a navigator of two seas, a man of two words.  He has been an
avid vessel of European Surrealism that arrived at the kingdom of liberty.
This man was capable of inventing a landscape, a liquid entity, an emulsion
of color shot through with forces and lighting, an electric space, a way of
seeing and feeling by blood blows, by emotion and by his infallible eye that
penetrates further than the appearances to the exact point where storms and
the diaphanous are generated”.

Matta came into the world and built his career as a professional artist.
 Matta made myth and legend of himself.  He is a fundamental milestone in the history of the art.  Matta was the architect of  a human being, who wanted to make his world a prophecy of freedom.

One of the characteristics of Matta’s personality, guarded against taking
center stage was his refusal to be interviewed.  We have
wandered through every catalog that has his phrases and some short
interviews to construct an imaginary conversation with this artist.

Ana María Escallón, Director
Art Museum of the Americas