Untitled (1939) embodies the artist’s urgency to disinhibit reality by applying a new pictorial narrative. In this drawing, biomorphic forms and the space surrounding them are mysteriously interwoven, creating an image with an ‘empty’ background merged with organic, almost mineral, elements. At this stage of his career Matta had no formal or academic arts training, and he developed his own imagery inspired by macro photographs of plants and flowers. This imagery nodded to dynamic and morphological interpretations of nature and growth. In Untitled, the artist aims to represent different moments in time within the same picture. This process forms the foundation of “psychological morphology”, a concept which would become fully developed in the artist’s practice during the 1940s, and defined as “the graphic result of the adaptation of internal energies to obstacles created by the environment”. In the specific case of Untitled, Matta represents an endlessly mutating scenario where elements are drawn from human and natural anatomy, while occupying a space between dreams and reality.

Matta believed his ideas to be deeply connected to objective forms. For this reason he needed a stage to display his biomorphic creations, a set made of spatial structures built following architectonic principles. Untitled (Study for the Prisoner of Light), exemplifies this very modus operandi Matta had adopted to create his personal account of reality. The drawing presents a dark structure, featuring elements that recall the plant realm, a mineral formation, a two dimensional form and a polyhedron. In this drawing, the structure appears to be anchored to an element left out of the pictorial surface. Nevertheless, one can imagine this mysterious object levitating, perhaps marking the ground or the horizon. The surface of the shape, created with lines of black ink, is reminiscent of climbing roots or tree bark. This gives the structure a tridimensionality and suggests it has volume.

In Scène érotique the principles employed for the conception and realisation of the two Untitled drawings are used to portray a different scenario. From a technical point of view, this is one of the artist’s most intriguing and refined works due to the attention given to the details and the clarity of the lines in the composition. In his drawing, Matta presents four pairs of figures each engaged in violent or sexual acts, within a barren volcanic landscape. The figures appear fleshy and contorted, the women bound and twisted into various positions. On the left side of the work a man stands on a woman, arms thrown into the air in what resembles a wild, almost primal, exultation. On the right side, a man raises a whip, preparing to lash his partner and at the centre a woman is being penetrated, her head thrown back in a scream. Hovering overhead a mythological creature clamps its jaws around a figure, who now hangs limp in the air. The figure appears to be holding a spear, which suggests that they were once engaged in a battle that has now ended in defeat. With this image, as in throughout his artistic production, Matta demonstrates how he could fulfil his artistic agenda while broadening the horizons of Surrealism and expand its possibilities.