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Artwork in Focus is the second chapter of the gallery's 'In Focus' series. Every week the gallery presents a viewing room featuring artworks that are available for purchase. This week we are presenting three works by Chilean artist Roberto Matta: Untitled, 1939, Untitled (Study for the Prisoner of Light), 1939–1943, and Scène érotique, c. 1943. This viewing room is the first instalment of two presentations that will explore Roberto Matta’s practice.
Roberto Matta joined the Surrealist group while living in Paris in 1937, after presenting his drawings to André Breton. Alongside Yves Tanguy and Gordon Onslow-Ford, Matta began to experiment with the Surrealist technique of automatic writing, in which written words or marks are produced without conscious intention. He started to paint in 1938 and from this point Matta’s work developed a unique, distinguished style. The artist created his own visual world, characterised by a preference for bright colours, fantastical architectural structures, and the presence of entities which assimilate the forces driving the human psyche. Matta created the following three works on paper during the late 1930s and early 1940s - while he was establishing his reputation in New York and influencing a generation of artists that would soon form the core of the Abstract Expressionist movement.
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Roberto MATTA1911 – 2002Untitled, 1939Pencil and coloured pencil on paper45 x 56 cm
17 ¾ x 22 ⅛ in -
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.
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Roberto MATTA1911 – 2002Untitled (Study for the Prisoner of Light), 1939 – 1943Ink on paper16.5 x 12.3 cm
6 ½ x 4 ⅞ in -
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.
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Roberto Matta, Le Forçat de la lumière (The Prisoner of Light), 1943. Private collection. Photo: Studio Bénédicte Petit, Paris.
The same structure appears in Matta’s painting Le Forçat de la lumière (The Prisoner of Light), 1943, pictured here suspended at the top of the canvas. In the painting, its look has morphed from the monochrome tone of the study drawing to an iridescent glow, formed of green, red and white oil paint brush strokes. In this new scenario, the cryptic object shines a light above an otherwise somber, desolated landscape. Observing the metamorphosis of this structure and its change from the drawing to the painting exemplifies how Matta created his surreal, biomorphic characters. As in this case, the artist would work on an idea by itself, gradually enriching it with both organic and architectonic features to establish its morphology.
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Roberto MATTA1911 – 2002Scène érotique, c. 1943Pencil and coloured pencil on paper29 x 33.1 cm
11 ⅜ x 13 in -
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.
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Biography & collections
Roberto Antonio Sebastián Matta Echaurren was born in Santiago, Chile, in 1911. After studying architecture at the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, in Santiago, Matta moved to Europe in 1933. In Paris he took a position as a draftsman in the architectural studio of Le Corbusier in Paris, which he held until 1937. During this time, while travelling in Spain and Portugal, the artist was introduced to the poets Federico García Lorca and Pablo Neruda. Through them, Matta became familiar with Surrealism and after meeting Salvador Dalí and André Breton, he joined the movement in the same year. In 1939 Matta moved to the United States. In New York, he started to form relationships with the new generation of painters which included artists such as Arshile Gorky, Robert Motherwell, and Jackson Pollock - with whom Matta experimented using techniques inspired by automatic writing. Matta remained in New York for almost a decade, and there established himself as one of the most influential artists of his time - which is confirmed by the exhibitions held throughout the 1940s at the Julien Levy Gallery, at the Pierre Matisse Gallery, at Peggy Guggenheim’s Art of This Century and later in the 1957 exhibition at MoMA, curated by William Rubin. In 1948 Matta returned to Paris, and for the following decades he lived and worked between South America and Europe, until he died in 2002 in Civitavecchia, Italy.
Today his works are held in many major collections around the world, including: Centre Pompidou, Paris; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam and the Tate Gallery in London.
Artwork in Focus: Three works by Roberto Matta (Part One): Untitled, 1939, Untitled (Study for the Prisoner of Light), 1939–1943, and Scène érotique, c. 1943
Past viewing_room