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Lot Essay
Matta used the two decades following his separation from the Surrealists and subsequent departure from New York, in 1948, to take stock of his practice at mid-career. A time of intense introspection as he appraised the devastation of postwar Europe—“being with a horrible crisis in society,” he reflected—these years gave rise to a deepening of his humanitarian commitment. “My vision of myself was becoming blind for not being made one with the people about me,” Matta explained. “I sought to create a new morphology of others within my own field of consciousness” (quoted in W. Rubin, “Matta,” The Bulletin of the Museum of Modern Art 25, no. 1, 1957, p. 9). Based between Paris and Rome, he renewed his connections to Latin America, traveling to Machu Picchu and returning to Chile, where he publicly supported the leftist coalition of Salvador Allende. His historically-laden social morphologies, initiated in the 1940s, took on increasingly monumental proportions and drew international acclaim, notably in murals for the UNESCO Headquarters in Paris (1956) and the University of Santiago (1962-63).
Amid renewed interest in Surrealism in the late 1960s, Matta again established himself at the forefront of the movement with works like the present Untitled, which reappraise “reality” in light of a new technological age, stretching from Third World battlefields to outer space. “I am looking for a new space, a sort of space of feeling,” he explained. “Every event, every chain of events, demands a special space. I must find it, I must create it for every case… Surrealism is ‘more reality.’ There is always the need to grasp ‘more reality;’ for only in this way can we create a truly human condition…Art always has been a reflection of the need to represent reality. I want to show the contradictions involved in reality. To me, that is the objective of modern art…to make visible, to give a vision of the structure of events” (quoted in Matta: A Totemic World, exh. cat., Andrew Crispo Gallery, New York, 1975, n.p.).
A multidimensional humanoid creature materializes in a pungent cloud of green pigment in the present Untitled, its features menacing and mechanomorphic. The blurred, glassy background recalls the shattered transparencies of Marcel Duchamp’s monumental Le Grand Verre, an important source for Matta’s later work, and its imaginings of science, electricity, and the fourth dimension. “Under the influence of the early machinist pictures of his friend Duchamp, man-like creatures with mechanical features began to appear in his works, in nightmare architectural settings, often amidst aggressive machinery and the crackling of high voltage electricity,” wrote critic Lavinia Learmont. “His mechanical monsters are painted on giant canvases so that they form a wide-screen theatre in which his bizarre personages undergo transformation and struggle, tortured and torturing, reflecting the cruelty and destruction of war…The best of his later works reflect his own struggle to interpret the specific terrors and obsessions of contemporary humanity and to evolve a pictorial mythology for our technological age” (“London,” Art and Artists 12, December 1977, p. 44).
Abby McEwen, Assistant Professor, University of Maryland, College Park
Amid renewed interest in Surrealism in the late 1960s, Matta again established himself at the forefront of the movement with works like the present Untitled, which reappraise “reality” in light of a new technological age, stretching from Third World battlefields to outer space. “I am looking for a new space, a sort of space of feeling,” he explained. “Every event, every chain of events, demands a special space. I must find it, I must create it for every case… Surrealism is ‘more reality.’ There is always the need to grasp ‘more reality;’ for only in this way can we create a truly human condition…Art always has been a reflection of the need to represent reality. I want to show the contradictions involved in reality. To me, that is the objective of modern art…to make visible, to give a vision of the structure of events” (quoted in Matta: A Totemic World, exh. cat., Andrew Crispo Gallery, New York, 1975, n.p.).
A multidimensional humanoid creature materializes in a pungent cloud of green pigment in the present Untitled, its features menacing and mechanomorphic. The blurred, glassy background recalls the shattered transparencies of Marcel Duchamp’s monumental Le Grand Verre, an important source for Matta’s later work, and its imaginings of science, electricity, and the fourth dimension. “Under the influence of the early machinist pictures of his friend Duchamp, man-like creatures with mechanical features began to appear in his works, in nightmare architectural settings, often amidst aggressive machinery and the crackling of high voltage electricity,” wrote critic Lavinia Learmont. “His mechanical monsters are painted on giant canvases so that they form a wide-screen theatre in which his bizarre personages undergo transformation and struggle, tortured and torturing, reflecting the cruelty and destruction of war…The best of his later works reflect his own struggle to interpret the specific terrors and obsessions of contemporary humanity and to evolve a pictorial mythology for our technological age” (“London,” Art and Artists 12, December 1977, p. 44).
Abby McEwen, Assistant Professor, University of Maryland, College Park