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Lot Essay
“A picture is not a canvas on the wall, it is the impact that hits the bull’s eye of your mind,” Matta declared in 1977. “There is in man the need to re-act in the endless web on which we interplay with the world. The artist is expected to see what is hidden, like the blind see with the mind…We live besieged by infra-reality, transparent-reality and a highly developed technology of mystification, camouflaging all that is relevant and a deliberate encourage of blindness” (quoted in Matta: Coïgitum, exh. cat., Hayward Gallery, London, 1977, pp. 7-8).
Matta’s canvases from these years, among them Les magies d’une flute, probe the underlying energies and interconnections of the cosmos, rendering vast, labyrinthine spaces inhabited by mechanomorphic beings, cyphers of a strange new world. Matta’s painting engendered new, (post-)humanist meditations on mankind, caught in the perpetual flux of time, space, and matter. “He was discovering a new territory of the imagination,” the poet Octavio Paz observed of this transformation in Matta’s practice. “Painting that is myth, legend, history, anecdote, and riddle. What his painting tells, however, is not what is happening in the present, but what is happening above and below the present, the play of forces and impulses that compose us, discompose and recompose us” (“Vestibule,” Matta: Surrealism and Beyond, exh. cat., Haggerty Museum of Art, Milwaukee, 1997, p. 25).
A shimmering, sulfurous phosphorescence glows within Les magies d’une flute, the yellow pigment flowing through interconnected and seemingly immaterial webs within a strange, surreal space. The work’s title may well allude to Mozart’s opera, The Magic Flute (1791), a fairy tale of light and darkness—no less, an allegorical quest for truth, enlightenment, and love—in which an enchanted flute possesses the power to transform sorrow into joy. Matta would have admired the libretto’s incorporation of Masonic symbols and rituals, signally the magical power of music to instill feelings of unity, humanity, and freedom. There is symphonic quality to Les magies d’une flute: its compositional elements—semitransparent lines and grids, washes of color, eddies of space—come together in dynamic harmony from the depths to the glimmering surface of the canvas.
In “The House of Glances,” a poem written for Matta, Paz described “a lunar geyser, a stalk of steam, a foliage of sparks, a great tree that lights up, goes out, lights up: you are in the interior of the reflections, you are in the house of glances.” The luminosity of his words comes to life in Les magies d’une flute, whose spectral brilliance is epitomized in the concluding verse:
In the mirror of music the constellations look at themselves before scattering,
the mirror sinks into itself, drowned in clarity until it is erased in a reflection,
spaces flow and hurl down under the glance of petrified time,
presences are flames, flames are tigers, the tigers have turned to waves,
a waterfall of transfigurations, a waterfall of repetitions, traps of time
(Crosscurrents of Modernism: Four Latin American Pioneers, exh. cat., Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, 1992, pp. 283 and 287).
Abby McEwen, Assistant Professor, University of Maryland, College Park
Matta’s canvases from these years, among them Les magies d’une flute, probe the underlying energies and interconnections of the cosmos, rendering vast, labyrinthine spaces inhabited by mechanomorphic beings, cyphers of a strange new world. Matta’s painting engendered new, (post-)humanist meditations on mankind, caught in the perpetual flux of time, space, and matter. “He was discovering a new territory of the imagination,” the poet Octavio Paz observed of this transformation in Matta’s practice. “Painting that is myth, legend, history, anecdote, and riddle. What his painting tells, however, is not what is happening in the present, but what is happening above and below the present, the play of forces and impulses that compose us, discompose and recompose us” (“Vestibule,” Matta: Surrealism and Beyond, exh. cat., Haggerty Museum of Art, Milwaukee, 1997, p. 25).
A shimmering, sulfurous phosphorescence glows within Les magies d’une flute, the yellow pigment flowing through interconnected and seemingly immaterial webs within a strange, surreal space. The work’s title may well allude to Mozart’s opera, The Magic Flute (1791), a fairy tale of light and darkness—no less, an allegorical quest for truth, enlightenment, and love—in which an enchanted flute possesses the power to transform sorrow into joy. Matta would have admired the libretto’s incorporation of Masonic symbols and rituals, signally the magical power of music to instill feelings of unity, humanity, and freedom. There is symphonic quality to Les magies d’une flute: its compositional elements—semitransparent lines and grids, washes of color, eddies of space—come together in dynamic harmony from the depths to the glimmering surface of the canvas.
In “The House of Glances,” a poem written for Matta, Paz described “a lunar geyser, a stalk of steam, a foliage of sparks, a great tree that lights up, goes out, lights up: you are in the interior of the reflections, you are in the house of glances.” The luminosity of his words comes to life in Les magies d’une flute, whose spectral brilliance is epitomized in the concluding verse:
In the mirror of music the constellations look at themselves before scattering,
the mirror sinks into itself, drowned in clarity until it is erased in a reflection,
spaces flow and hurl down under the glance of petrified time,
presences are flames, flames are tigers, the tigers have turned to waves,
a waterfall of transfigurations, a waterfall of repetitions, traps of time
(Crosscurrents of Modernism: Four Latin American Pioneers, exh. cat., Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, 1992, pp. 283 and 287).
Abby McEwen, Assistant Professor, University of Maryland, College Park