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Lot Essay
Germana Matta Ferrari has kindly confirmed the authenticity of this work.
Venturing onto the unknown territories of the psyche, The Red Sun belongs to a series of seminal works on paper that, towards the end of the 1930s, would set forth Chilean Roberto Matta’s unique artistic vision and proclaimed him a distinct presence in Surrealism. Animated by vegetal and organic forms, the work charts an unusual process of mutation by which breasts, hands and buttocks emerge from the viscous protuberances of a proliferating, alive forest. Dripping over this metamorphosing landscape, a red sun liquefies itself into a series of soft, burning tentacles, enhancing the sense of melting forms that is at the core of the drawing.
Created in 1938, The Red Sun dates from a crucial period in Matta’s career, in which the artist forged the unique artistic universe of his work. Charting the transformations and expansions of an intangible world, works such as The Red Sun belong to a series of fantastical landscapes Matta defined as Morphologies psychologiques (psychological morphologies). Initiated by the use of automatic drawing, these works aimed at conveying the fluid, complex and shifting dimension of the mind. Automatism allowed the artist to insert himself into the flow of his own thoughts and to transcribe it onto the paper. Matta defined the process as a ‘…method of reading ‘live’ the actual function of thinking at the same speed as the matter we are thinking of, to read at the speed of events, to grasp unconscious material functioning in our memory with the tools at our disposal. Automatism means the irrational and the rational are running parallel and can send sparks to each other and light the common road’ (quoted in Matta: Making the Invisible Visible, exh. cat., Boston,2004, p. 30). Transforming the pulses and darts of the psyche into a metamorphic wide landscape, works such as The Red Sun established the essence of Matta’s artistic universe and most remarkable paintings. In 1939, the unique dimension explored by Matta’s works would dazzle the Surrealists; writing in Minotaure, Breton declared: ‘One of our youngest friends, Matta is already at the peak of a brilliant pictorial production (…) Every one of the pictures painted by Matta since last year is a festival where all of the games of chance are played’ (quoted in ibid., p. 32).
The historical importance of works such as The Red Sun is enhanced by the fact that this particular work belonged to the British artist Gordon Onslow Ford, who had played an instrumental role in Matta’s development of the Morphologies psychologiques. In 1938 – the same year the present work was executed – Matta and Gordon had spent the summer working together in Brittany. There, they studied the work of the Russian mathematician Ouspensky, whose theory of the fourth dimension would become instrumental in Matta’s creation of works such as The Red Sun. According to Onslow Ford, Matta’s Morphologies psychologiques expressed the artist’s belief that ‘reality can only be represented in a state of perpetual transformation’ (quoted in Matta: Making the Invisible Visible, exh. cat., Boston, 2004, p. 31). Refusing traditional, planar representation of space, works such as The Red Sun aimed at conveying the existence of a world beyond spatial and temporal limits, in which forms and entities coexisted in a perpetual flux of transformation. A token of Matta’s stunning artistic coming of age, The Red Sun may have reminded Onslow Ford of a moment of particular importance for both artists. Onslow Ford would later remember: ‘At the end of [1938], we had crossed the limits of the unknown in modern art and we were launched in an adventure that we have pursued since, each of us in our own way. (…) our universes were indeed very close to one another, beyond dreams, situated in place for which it existed no model and which could only be revealed by painting’ (quoted in Matta 1936-1944: Début d’un nouveau monde, exh. cat., Paris, 2004, p. 82).
Venturing onto the unknown territories of the psyche, The Red Sun belongs to a series of seminal works on paper that, towards the end of the 1930s, would set forth Chilean Roberto Matta’s unique artistic vision and proclaimed him a distinct presence in Surrealism. Animated by vegetal and organic forms, the work charts an unusual process of mutation by which breasts, hands and buttocks emerge from the viscous protuberances of a proliferating, alive forest. Dripping over this metamorphosing landscape, a red sun liquefies itself into a series of soft, burning tentacles, enhancing the sense of melting forms that is at the core of the drawing.
Created in 1938, The Red Sun dates from a crucial period in Matta’s career, in which the artist forged the unique artistic universe of his work. Charting the transformations and expansions of an intangible world, works such as The Red Sun belong to a series of fantastical landscapes Matta defined as Morphologies psychologiques (psychological morphologies). Initiated by the use of automatic drawing, these works aimed at conveying the fluid, complex and shifting dimension of the mind. Automatism allowed the artist to insert himself into the flow of his own thoughts and to transcribe it onto the paper. Matta defined the process as a ‘…method of reading ‘live’ the actual function of thinking at the same speed as the matter we are thinking of, to read at the speed of events, to grasp unconscious material functioning in our memory with the tools at our disposal. Automatism means the irrational and the rational are running parallel and can send sparks to each other and light the common road’ (quoted in Matta: Making the Invisible Visible, exh. cat., Boston,2004, p. 30). Transforming the pulses and darts of the psyche into a metamorphic wide landscape, works such as The Red Sun established the essence of Matta’s artistic universe and most remarkable paintings. In 1939, the unique dimension explored by Matta’s works would dazzle the Surrealists; writing in Minotaure, Breton declared: ‘One of our youngest friends, Matta is already at the peak of a brilliant pictorial production (…) Every one of the pictures painted by Matta since last year is a festival where all of the games of chance are played’ (quoted in ibid., p. 32).
The historical importance of works such as The Red Sun is enhanced by the fact that this particular work belonged to the British artist Gordon Onslow Ford, who had played an instrumental role in Matta’s development of the Morphologies psychologiques. In 1938 – the same year the present work was executed – Matta and Gordon had spent the summer working together in Brittany. There, they studied the work of the Russian mathematician Ouspensky, whose theory of the fourth dimension would become instrumental in Matta’s creation of works such as The Red Sun. According to Onslow Ford, Matta’s Morphologies psychologiques expressed the artist’s belief that ‘reality can only be represented in a state of perpetual transformation’ (quoted in Matta: Making the Invisible Visible, exh. cat., Boston, 2004, p. 31). Refusing traditional, planar representation of space, works such as The Red Sun aimed at conveying the existence of a world beyond spatial and temporal limits, in which forms and entities coexisted in a perpetual flux of transformation. A token of Matta’s stunning artistic coming of age, The Red Sun may have reminded Onslow Ford of a moment of particular importance for both artists. Onslow Ford would later remember: ‘At the end of [1938], we had crossed the limits of the unknown in modern art and we were launched in an adventure that we have pursued since, each of us in our own way. (…) our universes were indeed very close to one another, beyond dreams, situated in place for which it existed no model and which could only be revealed by painting’ (quoted in Matta 1936-1944: Début d’un nouveau monde, exh. cat., Paris, 2004, p. 82).