拍品專文
“There is in man the need to re-act in the endless web on which we interplay with the world,” Matta once reflected. “The artist is expected to see what is hidden, like the blind see with the mind” (in Roberto Matta: Paintings and Drawings: 1971-1979, exh. cat., Tasende Gallery, La Jolla, 1980, p. 8). Matta left New York in 1948, amid a falling-out with the Surrealist circle, and over the following decade he took stock of his practice at mid-career, working out his existential doubts and humanist vision during an intensely self-reflexive period of peripatetic wandering that took him to London, Paris, Rome, and Chile. He painted sparingly between 1948 and 1950, meditating on the ills of social injustice and reaffirming the necessity of what he described as “renaming the world” (in W. Rubin, Matta, exh. cat., Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1957, p. 9). Matta continued to invest the poetics of his art with a keen social and psychic consciousness, seen already in the fraught, war-ridden “social morphologies” of the mid- to late 1940s, and his subsequent canvases—among them the present Untitled—probe new conceptual territory between dystopian techno-futurism and organic regeneration.
“I want to show the contradictions involved in reality,” Matta emphasized. “It is the space created by contradictions, the space of that struggle, which interests me as the best picture of our real condition. The fault with most pictures today is that they show an a priori freedom from which they have eliminated all contradiction, all resemblance to reality.” His idiosyncratic realism—a postwar surrealism—manifested in paintings like Untitled that turn Matta’s world-consciousness inward to the deepest recesses of his psyche and outward again, into the living chemistry of the cosmos. “The imagery of these pictures, as, indeed, of most of Matta’s work, reflects his interest in science and his belief that the artist must interpret in subjective human terms the technological and spiritual impact of its discoveries,” curator William Rubin observed. “From the beginning, the microscopic-telescopic realities of the universe stimulated Matta’s visionary process, and this interest in science represents a major distinction between him and the more psychologically oriented Surrealists” (Matta, op. cit., pp. 7, 9).
Astral light filters through the shadowy, non-linear depths of Untitled, illuminating a strange architecture of planes and geometries that seem to bend and mutate in space. A pigmented solar mass glows near the top of the canvas, suggestively germinal and cosmic; a vertebral column of light pierces the space to the right, descending through translucent, jewel-colored surfaces and flowing—like celestial electricity—through nodes and filaments that crisscross the space. “Matta’s space is space in motion,” the poet Octavio Paz reflected, “in continuous bifurcation and recomposition. Plural space that flows. Space that possesses the properties of time: elapsing and dividing, uninterruptedly, into discrete entities. . . . Temporalized space” (“Vestibule,” Matta: Surrealism and Beyond, exh. cat., The Patrick and Beatrice Haggerty Museum of Art, Milwaukee, 1997, p. 25).
Abby McEwen, Assistant Professor, University of Maryland, College Park
“I want to show the contradictions involved in reality,” Matta emphasized. “It is the space created by contradictions, the space of that struggle, which interests me as the best picture of our real condition. The fault with most pictures today is that they show an a priori freedom from which they have eliminated all contradiction, all resemblance to reality.” His idiosyncratic realism—a postwar surrealism—manifested in paintings like Untitled that turn Matta’s world-consciousness inward to the deepest recesses of his psyche and outward again, into the living chemistry of the cosmos. “The imagery of these pictures, as, indeed, of most of Matta’s work, reflects his interest in science and his belief that the artist must interpret in subjective human terms the technological and spiritual impact of its discoveries,” curator William Rubin observed. “From the beginning, the microscopic-telescopic realities of the universe stimulated Matta’s visionary process, and this interest in science represents a major distinction between him and the more psychologically oriented Surrealists” (Matta, op. cit., pp. 7, 9).
Astral light filters through the shadowy, non-linear depths of Untitled, illuminating a strange architecture of planes and geometries that seem to bend and mutate in space. A pigmented solar mass glows near the top of the canvas, suggestively germinal and cosmic; a vertebral column of light pierces the space to the right, descending through translucent, jewel-colored surfaces and flowing—like celestial electricity—through nodes and filaments that crisscross the space. “Matta’s space is space in motion,” the poet Octavio Paz reflected, “in continuous bifurcation and recomposition. Plural space that flows. Space that possesses the properties of time: elapsing and dividing, uninterruptedly, into discrete entities. . . . Temporalized space” (“Vestibule,” Matta: Surrealism and Beyond, exh. cat., The Patrick and Beatrice Haggerty Museum of Art, Milwaukee, 1997, p. 25).
Abby McEwen, Assistant Professor, University of Maryland, College Park