Art Snippet: Roberto Matta

"I am interested only in the unknown and I work for my own astonishment."

Roberto Matta (November 11, 1911 – November 23, 2002) was one of Chile's best-known painters and a seminal figure in 20th century abstract expressionist and surrealist art.

Born in Santiago, he initially studied architecture at the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile in Santiago. At the end of his studies Matta left behind his privileged upbringing and conservative education to join the Merchant Marines. He settled in Paris in 1935, becoming an apprentice with Modernist architect Le Corbusier's. He stayed on to work with Le Corbusier for the next two years. 

Through his friendship with Federico Garcia Lorca, he met Salvador Dali and was soon invited by Andre Breton to join the Surrealist movement. He gave up architecture and went on to become one of the great Surrealists. Matta is widely acclaimed for his critical—and catalytic—influence on the development of Abstract Expressionism and on his contemporaries, including Jackson Pollock, Arshile Gorky, Mark Rothko and Robert Motherwell.

“The function of art,” Matta once said, “is to unveil the enormous economic, cultural, and emotional forces that materially interact in our lives and that constitute the real space in which we live.” 

Indeed pushing beyond the Surrealists’ typical Freudian-inspired work, Matta sought to create an art that was not purely introspective, but that instead spoke to a broader social context. From his earlier landscapes of the tumultuous Chilean geography to his portrayal of the horrific realities of World War II, the racial violence in the United States in the 1960s and the war in Vietnam, Matta’s energized canvases reflect a profound awareness of the world and a unique ability to portray the realities of our shared social history. 

In 1966 Matta presented an installation of his paintings in a new format which he called an "open cube". Matta wanted people to become absorbed by his pictorial universe, and for this reason he made viewers stand in the middle of the cube as if they were another side of it.

For Matta the "open cube" was the total work of art which makes the viewer protagonist of the work and envelopes him. Spatial investigation was one of Matta's constant aims.


The Centro Cultural Palacio La Moneda in Santiago was recently celebrating the Centenario Matta: 11.11.11 with a great retrospective. 



Unfortunately we were not allowed to take any pictures inside the exhibition rooms so I tried to re-create the open cube installation in my little collage book. Just imagine you would be standing in front of the red rectangular piece below which is approx 4 meters long and 2 meters high and you would be "enveloped" by the 4 square pieces of 2m x 2m each on the sides and above your head:

That's what Matta's concept of open-cube looks like... on a smaller scale :)

"Resistance is in each of us. We resist by exercising our creativity. That is true poetry - when we seek new comparisons, other ways of looking and conceiving of things." 

For more details on the artist's legacy, check: http://www.theartstory.org/artist-matta-roberto.htm

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sources: http://thepacegallery.com/ ; www.wikipedia.com