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Lot Essay
The Chilean painter Matta was an intrepid explorer of space-- psychological, cosmological, and mythological. His pictorial mappings of these psychic terrains drew inspiration from a variety of sources: surrealism, non-Euclidian geometry, fourth dimensional notions of time and space, as well as the lyric poetry of his friends Pablo Neruda, Gabriela Mistral, and Federico García Lorca. Throughout his long and productive life (1911-2002) Matta unceasingly surveyed the inner topography of the mind, in order to reveal the telluric currents of the imagination.
In the fall of 1937 Matta met André Breton and joined the Surrealist circle, soon becoming acquainted with Salvador Dalí, Joan Miró, Marcel Duchamp, and Yves Tanguy. While studying architecture in the early 1930s at the Universidad Católica in Santiago, Matta had experimented with drawing organic forms. Now, under the influence of these artists, he absorbed two important Surrealist innovations that would radically impact the development of his creative vision: biomorphism and automatism. Biomorphism enabled him to continue, in a deeper and more inventive manner, his earlier semiabstract renderings of organic forms. It was the working methods of automatism, however, that became the cornerstone of his new artistic practice. Surrendering his hand to spontaneous movements believed to spring freely from the subconscious mind, his work conceptually fused subject and process. These automatist techniques consisted of pouring, wiping and sponging thin glazes of color to build up a multilayered translucent surface. Matta called his new works "inscapes" or "psychological morphologies" which were intended to serve as analogies for states of consciousness in perpetual transformation.
Because of the worsening political situation in Europe, Matta moved to New York in 1939 where he lived until 1948, when he returned to Europe. During this time period he further developed his "inscapes" which now seethed with internal struggles, apocalyptic upheavals and pulsating organic forms. After a trip to Mexico in 1941 his paintings incorporated volcanic imagery whose seismic tremors suggested emotional and sexual turmoil. Julien Levy Gallery gave him his first solo exhibition in 1940 and the colorful visionary paintings he presented, made all the more dramatic by his use of flowing paint that was allowed to drip across the canvas, made a powerful impression on U.S. painters. A generation of New York Abstract Expressionist painters--Baziotes, Motherwell, Pollock and Gorky--all later acknowledged his influence.
Tige Verte (1943) belongs to a group of works Matta painted roughly between 1942-44, which includes Le vertige d'Eros (The Vertigo of Eros) (1944) in the Museum of Modern Art collection. Jacqueline Barnitz has pointed out that Le vertige d'Eros can be understood as a play on words, for in French it sounds like "le vert tige des roses" (the green stem of roses). Matta was very close to Duchamp during these years, so this is probably a reference to his alter ego Rrose Selavy. With its similar title and pictorial language, Tige Verte may be seen as a link to this great masterpiece by Matta. Moving away from landscape and visceral imagery, these works evince a new concept of space. Hinting at the vastness of outer space, lines of flashing color in the darkness suggest the movement of heavenly bodies. These same lines also emulate mental activity or emotions as they traverse the nether world of our interior, like lightening strikes briefly illuminating the darkness. William Ruben, Chief Curator of Painting and Sculpture at MoMA, praised Matta's ability to evoke "an infinitely deep space that suggests simultaneously the cosmos and the recesses of the mind." Possessing an extraordinarily complex surface, Tige verte opens onto a vast, dimensionless, metaphysical void. Everywhere is contradiction, flux, and chaos. Planes of opaque color emphasize the canvas surface while nearby translucent areas suggest three-dimensional space. Glowing red mineral shapes are interspersed with swirls of yellow light, white lines seem scratched onto the surface, and flame-like little tongues of color flicker fitfully here and there. Electrical currents flowing through water, mathematical calculations being washed off a chalkboard, life forming in primordial seas, what is this hallucinatory space and what is happening in it? Is this an occult space marked by magical diagrams and in the process of spiritual transformations? The full title, Tige verte (Les possessions) [Green Stem (Possessions)], perhaps gives us a subtle hint that what we are witnessing are the invisible undercurrents that connect all life, normally invisible to our profane and uncomprehending eyes.
Susan L. Aberth, Ph.D.
Annandale-on-Hudson.
In the fall of 1937 Matta met André Breton and joined the Surrealist circle, soon becoming acquainted with Salvador Dalí, Joan Miró, Marcel Duchamp, and Yves Tanguy. While studying architecture in the early 1930s at the Universidad Católica in Santiago, Matta had experimented with drawing organic forms. Now, under the influence of these artists, he absorbed two important Surrealist innovations that would radically impact the development of his creative vision: biomorphism and automatism. Biomorphism enabled him to continue, in a deeper and more inventive manner, his earlier semiabstract renderings of organic forms. It was the working methods of automatism, however, that became the cornerstone of his new artistic practice. Surrendering his hand to spontaneous movements believed to spring freely from the subconscious mind, his work conceptually fused subject and process. These automatist techniques consisted of pouring, wiping and sponging thin glazes of color to build up a multilayered translucent surface. Matta called his new works "inscapes" or "psychological morphologies" which were intended to serve as analogies for states of consciousness in perpetual transformation.
Because of the worsening political situation in Europe, Matta moved to New York in 1939 where he lived until 1948, when he returned to Europe. During this time period he further developed his "inscapes" which now seethed with internal struggles, apocalyptic upheavals and pulsating organic forms. After a trip to Mexico in 1941 his paintings incorporated volcanic imagery whose seismic tremors suggested emotional and sexual turmoil. Julien Levy Gallery gave him his first solo exhibition in 1940 and the colorful visionary paintings he presented, made all the more dramatic by his use of flowing paint that was allowed to drip across the canvas, made a powerful impression on U.S. painters. A generation of New York Abstract Expressionist painters--Baziotes, Motherwell, Pollock and Gorky--all later acknowledged his influence.
Tige Verte (1943) belongs to a group of works Matta painted roughly between 1942-44, which includes Le vertige d'Eros (The Vertigo of Eros) (1944) in the Museum of Modern Art collection. Jacqueline Barnitz has pointed out that Le vertige d'Eros can be understood as a play on words, for in French it sounds like "le vert tige des roses" (the green stem of roses). Matta was very close to Duchamp during these years, so this is probably a reference to his alter ego Rrose Selavy. With its similar title and pictorial language, Tige Verte may be seen as a link to this great masterpiece by Matta. Moving away from landscape and visceral imagery, these works evince a new concept of space. Hinting at the vastness of outer space, lines of flashing color in the darkness suggest the movement of heavenly bodies. These same lines also emulate mental activity or emotions as they traverse the nether world of our interior, like lightening strikes briefly illuminating the darkness. William Ruben, Chief Curator of Painting and Sculpture at MoMA, praised Matta's ability to evoke "an infinitely deep space that suggests simultaneously the cosmos and the recesses of the mind." Possessing an extraordinarily complex surface, Tige verte opens onto a vast, dimensionless, metaphysical void. Everywhere is contradiction, flux, and chaos. Planes of opaque color emphasize the canvas surface while nearby translucent areas suggest three-dimensional space. Glowing red mineral shapes are interspersed with swirls of yellow light, white lines seem scratched onto the surface, and flame-like little tongues of color flicker fitfully here and there. Electrical currents flowing through water, mathematical calculations being washed off a chalkboard, life forming in primordial seas, what is this hallucinatory space and what is happening in it? Is this an occult space marked by magical diagrams and in the process of spiritual transformations? The full title, Tige verte (Les possessions) [Green Stem (Possessions)], perhaps gives us a subtle hint that what we are witnessing are the invisible undercurrents that connect all life, normally invisible to our profane and uncomprehending eyes.
Susan L. Aberth, Ph.D.
Annandale-on-Hudson.