Jun 24 , 2020
MATTA AND SURREALISM
"I do not paint landscapes, I paint sersajes", expressed Roberto Matta with his surprising ingenuity to those who listened to him, considered one of the most universal artists that Chile has had and a key figure in the artistic avant-gardes of the 20th century. His concerns about being, the universe, the Latin verb, poetry, freedom, the telluric, the alchemical, physics rushed over his canvases, sculptures, drawings, engravings and that he conceived a whole personal cosmogony.
Matta had a close relationship with the poet Federico García Lorca, whom he met at his aunt's house in Madrid and with the Chilean poets Pablo Neruda and Gabriela Mistral. It is also important to rescue his part in the exhibitions organized by the surrealist group La Mandragora in Santiago de Chile, inaugurated at the Dédalo Gallery in 1948, and at the Chilean-American Institute of Culture in 1951, demonstrating their close ties to national intellectuals and culture. , despite having lived a large part of his life abroad.
Returning to Lorca, he gives Matta a letter of recommendation for Salvador Dalí, which meant his entry into a new world of creation. Dalí's philosophy of painting was significant in bringing him to Surrealism. The Catalan artist expressed the essence of his surreal invention in these words: ¨My total ambition in the pictorial domain is to materialize the images of concrete irrationality…. So that the world of imagination and concrete irrationality can be as evident in an objective way ... as that of the external world of the phenomena of reality" Dalí introduces the Chilean creator to André Breton, animator and fundamental figure of Surrealism. Matta joins this movement in 1937.
Breton credited Matta with the revolution in pictorial space and the use of color in painting, the result of new ways of seeing the world, compatible with the latest discoveries in science. He praised Matta's innovative uses of color for symbolic purposes and his daring experiments, with a wide range of shadows, fertilizing realities of other worlds and later influenced by the Great Transparencies, specters who live in parallel dimensions and who are cited by Breton in his Prolegomena to a third surreal manifesto or not in 1942.
Many artists who worked in Europe (Eugenio Granell, Remedios Varo, André Masson, Leonora Carrington, Piet Mondrian, Marc Chagall ...) warned the arrival of the Second World War and the reign of Hitler as a threat and made the decision to leave for America . Matta did the same and went into exile in New York, from 1939 to 1948. While in North America, he enjoyed the friendship of Marcel Duchamp (where his works as The Passage from Virgin to the Bride they were important references for the development of his art) and he was one of the promoters of the famous New York School, encouraging young painters Pollock, De Kooning and Motherwell to delve deeper into psychic automatism.
Finally Matta fell out with several surrealists over the "Gorky affair", who were also suspicious of their growing interest in science. There are also differences with the abstract expressionists, since they rejected Surrealism in pursuit of formalisms in art. Matta returned to Europe in 1948, to seek a direction that would not stray from the surreal adventure, always receptive to incorporating broader humanitarian and scientific interests. As Alain Jouffroy defined Matta: "He was one of the few surrealists who could understand the theory of relativity at the mathematical level." Like Matta, there are other dissident surrealists who were interested in science; this is the case of the Austrian Wolfgang Paalen and his magazine Dyn, published in Mexico (1940s) and with the dissemination of topics ranging from archeology to quantum physics.
In 1959 Matta was again accepted into the ranks of Surrealism, when he participated in the ceremonial The will of the Marquis de Sade, made by Jean Benoît in Paris.
The poetic structure that shaped Matta's work is essentially conceptual and ideological in nature. Its particular points derive from two dominant intellectual concepts in the 20th century: Freud's theory of the unconscious and the culture of modern science, which have been identified by C.P. Snow and others. Freud serves as a means of examining the inner life of the unconscious, while science provides experimental methods for exploring the external world. Matta's task was to discover wisdom and creativity, hidden in the inner unconscious, and how to relate these discoveries to the outside world. Make sense of a more reality, where the artist sees and solves mental problems as a vertor (mattiano concept) in diverse supports.
