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Lot Essay
Untitled, executed around 1940, combines various elements that are central to Matta's mind and art. In amongst the green cacti, that appeared on the Chilean artist's return to the New World and marked the true entrance of figurative tendencies in his work, can be seen strange pieces of unidentifiable technology, amorphous structures and geometrical compositions reminiscent of alchemical diagrams. This hectic landscape is heavily structured and moulded according to seemingly strict circles, triangles and contour lines, and yet it has also blatantly been executed in a feverish, freehand manner. The image itself is feverish, the externalisation of Matta's own state of mind at the time of execution.
This image is rare in its early incorporation of seemingly technological objects. In the bottom left, an intricate raygun-like object with a cutaway section lies on the ground. The fineness and restraint in its detailing provide a contrast with the more haphazard surroundings. However, this image and the contrast with the background reveal Matta's architectural background. Indeed, the entire structure of the drawing, while not controlled, nonetheless has an innate order and logic, form overlapping form, the colouring executed in most places with deliberate precision. Although the initial lines smack of action-drawing, Matta has refined and elaborated the picture, colouring in, joining dots, adding shadows.
Matta was interested in many disciplines, although he was arguably less interested in discipline itself. Among these were botany, evident in the flowers and cacti of Untitled, and alchemy. His interest in the sciences stretched from extreme to extreme, from fact to what others thought of as fantasy - he believed science to be merely another art. Untitled's mixture of organic and pseudo-architectural shapes creates a sense of arcana and the mysterious. The viewer peers into the ultimately incomprehensible mind of another, in this case a man whose training was in the rigid discipline of architecture and design, but who was converted to Surrealism. Matta has used his unique visual language with its indecipherable symbols to illustrate both the gulf between one individual's mind and any other, while at the same time presenting his universal vision of the crisis of modernity. The freedom and intensity of this vision, the means with which Matta manages to use tiny everyday motifs in a vast incomprehensible collage, was to prove an invaluable prompt to the post-war American artists, especially Arshile Gorky, showing them how to allow their inner urges, their need for expression, to be a guide in its own right.
This image is rare in its early incorporation of seemingly technological objects. In the bottom left, an intricate raygun-like object with a cutaway section lies on the ground. The fineness and restraint in its detailing provide a contrast with the more haphazard surroundings. However, this image and the contrast with the background reveal Matta's architectural background. Indeed, the entire structure of the drawing, while not controlled, nonetheless has an innate order and logic, form overlapping form, the colouring executed in most places with deliberate precision. Although the initial lines smack of action-drawing, Matta has refined and elaborated the picture, colouring in, joining dots, adding shadows.
Matta was interested in many disciplines, although he was arguably less interested in discipline itself. Among these were botany, evident in the flowers and cacti of Untitled, and alchemy. His interest in the sciences stretched from extreme to extreme, from fact to what others thought of as fantasy - he believed science to be merely another art. Untitled's mixture of organic and pseudo-architectural shapes creates a sense of arcana and the mysterious. The viewer peers into the ultimately incomprehensible mind of another, in this case a man whose training was in the rigid discipline of architecture and design, but who was converted to Surrealism. Matta has used his unique visual language with its indecipherable symbols to illustrate both the gulf between one individual's mind and any other, while at the same time presenting his universal vision of the crisis of modernity. The freedom and intensity of this vision, the means with which Matta manages to use tiny everyday motifs in a vast incomprehensible collage, was to prove an invaluable prompt to the post-war American artists, especially Arshile Gorky, showing them how to allow their inner urges, their need for expression, to be a guide in its own right.