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Lot Essay
Painted in New York City in 1941-42, Matta's Endless Nudes is one of a number of canvases that Matta called "inscapes" or "psychological morphologies". In these marvelous early works, Matta who had begun painting in 1938 at the age of twenty-six, was, as he defined it, "inventing visual equivalences to various states of consciousness". Having joined the Surrealist circle in Paris in 1937, Matta, a man of boundless energy and curiosity, set about painting "the colossal structure of life". He attempted to capture the continuum from matter to mind, from microcosm to macrocosm, from the tiniest seed to the vastness of the universe. What he wanted was "to feel the earth as ones own body." To him, the physical and the spiritual were one.
Among the first of the European artists known as the "Surrealists in exile" to arrive on these shores, Matta went to work immediately. His talent was quickly recognized: in April 1940, five months after his arrival, he showed his work (along with two other artists) at the Surrealist-oriented Julien Levy Gallery. In 1942 he had a one-man show at the Pierre Matisse Gallery. His paintings from the American years, 1939 to 1948, are imaginary landscapes that suggest the interior spaces of the unconscious mind. But Matta's paintings take the viewer on a journey that is not only mental, it is also cosmic. (Infatuated with scientific theory, Matta talked a lot about the fourth dimension.) And, even as he carries our imaginations into some kind of boundless, miasmic, intergalactic space, he also takes us to a hot, liquid world of labyrinthine membranes inside the body. Especially in his paintings from before 1943, space, articulated by slow curves in constant flux, is voluptuous. In Endless Nudes the movement of paint, handled with Matta's characteristic ease and fluency, stands for the rhythms of the human organism. Pigment is first poured and then rubbed with rags in a free improvisational manner-
Matta was a proponent of the Surrealist technique of 'psychic automatism," a kind of visual stream of consciousness that aimed to go beyond habit and rational thinking and to discover the "real functioning of the mind." After laying down broad areas of color, Matta applied transparent veils of white, which he called "a caress." His brush unearthed shapes in the movement of paint and transformed these shapes into precise, yet ambiguous biomorphs. Endless Nudes lures us into a uterine landscape where forms sinking and swelling suggests themes of germination and birth. "Man," Matta once said, "misses the obscure thrusts of his beginnings, that enveloped him in moist walls, where the blood beat right next to the eye with the sound of the mother." Because Matta has not yet abandoned the horizon line in Endless Nudes, there is an implication of earth and sky, but both spheres are full of fleshy folds that sometimes become nude bodies. On the lower right, just in the threshold of recognizability, is a recumbent embracing couple. In the sky above them the movement of clouds creates what looks like a male torso seen from the back and, lying beside him, must be a female. (We see only her bent knee.) At the painting's center red/brown strokes resemble a tree trunck joining earth and sky, but these strokes can also be seen as female genitals , the spread legs encompassing the cosmos. For Matta sex and the idea of the infinite were intimately related. He wrote of his desire "To see the orgasm of the heavens, to see the sky as a palapitaing organ." With its ecstatic, El Greco-like tumult of clouds and its hallucinatory color, Endless Nudes fulfills that desire. But the painting's orgiastic energy also belongs to the mineral world: in spring 1941 Matta traveled to Mexico where he was impressed with the brilliance of color and light and where he witnessed the birth of the volcano Paricutín. The paintings he made upon his return to New York reflect his apprehension of the erath's terrifying power, a power that echoed his own spiritual eruptions: dreams, he said, are "images of our volcanic experiences." And, beyond that, Endless Nudes's upheaval of form and its lava flow of color was perhaps also a response to the cataclysm of war. Matta's genius lay in his ability to keep us reinventing his fantastic landscapes: now they are inside, now they are outside. Next they pull us into some mysterious beyond.
Hayden Herrera
April 2003
Among the first of the European artists known as the "Surrealists in exile" to arrive on these shores, Matta went to work immediately. His talent was quickly recognized: in April 1940, five months after his arrival, he showed his work (along with two other artists) at the Surrealist-oriented Julien Levy Gallery. In 1942 he had a one-man show at the Pierre Matisse Gallery. His paintings from the American years, 1939 to 1948, are imaginary landscapes that suggest the interior spaces of the unconscious mind. But Matta's paintings take the viewer on a journey that is not only mental, it is also cosmic. (Infatuated with scientific theory, Matta talked a lot about the fourth dimension.) And, even as he carries our imaginations into some kind of boundless, miasmic, intergalactic space, he also takes us to a hot, liquid world of labyrinthine membranes inside the body. Especially in his paintings from before 1943, space, articulated by slow curves in constant flux, is voluptuous. In Endless Nudes the movement of paint, handled with Matta's characteristic ease and fluency, stands for the rhythms of the human organism. Pigment is first poured and then rubbed with rags in a free improvisational manner-
Matta was a proponent of the Surrealist technique of 'psychic automatism," a kind of visual stream of consciousness that aimed to go beyond habit and rational thinking and to discover the "real functioning of the mind." After laying down broad areas of color, Matta applied transparent veils of white, which he called "a caress." His brush unearthed shapes in the movement of paint and transformed these shapes into precise, yet ambiguous biomorphs. Endless Nudes lures us into a uterine landscape where forms sinking and swelling suggests themes of germination and birth. "Man," Matta once said, "misses the obscure thrusts of his beginnings, that enveloped him in moist walls, where the blood beat right next to the eye with the sound of the mother." Because Matta has not yet abandoned the horizon line in Endless Nudes, there is an implication of earth and sky, but both spheres are full of fleshy folds that sometimes become nude bodies. On the lower right, just in the threshold of recognizability, is a recumbent embracing couple. In the sky above them the movement of clouds creates what looks like a male torso seen from the back and, lying beside him, must be a female. (We see only her bent knee.) At the painting's center red/brown strokes resemble a tree trunck joining earth and sky, but these strokes can also be seen as female genitals , the spread legs encompassing the cosmos. For Matta sex and the idea of the infinite were intimately related. He wrote of his desire "To see the orgasm of the heavens, to see the sky as a palapitaing organ." With its ecstatic, El Greco-like tumult of clouds and its hallucinatory color, Endless Nudes fulfills that desire. But the painting's orgiastic energy also belongs to the mineral world: in spring 1941 Matta traveled to Mexico where he was impressed with the brilliance of color and light and where he witnessed the birth of the volcano Paricutín. The paintings he made upon his return to New York reflect his apprehension of the erath's terrifying power, a power that echoed his own spiritual eruptions: dreams, he said, are "images of our volcanic experiences." And, beyond that, Endless Nudes's upheaval of form and its lava flow of color was perhaps also a response to the cataclysm of war. Matta's genius lay in his ability to keep us reinventing his fantastic landscapes: now they are inside, now they are outside. Next they pull us into some mysterious beyond.
Hayden Herrera
April 2003