Projection des liquides des substances VI

Created in the spring of 1938, Projection des liquides des substances VI is a key early work by Roberto Matta, dating from a crucial period in the artist’s career, as he truly began to stretch the boundaries of his unique artistic universe. Charting the transformations and expansions of an intangible world, Projection des liquides des substances VI belongs to a series of fantastical landscapes in which Matta explored concepts of organic growth and transformation, movement and evolution, the microscopic and macroscopic, and the passage of time and space. Initiated by the use of automatic drawing, these works aimed to convey the fluid, complex and shifting dimension of both the universe and the mind, as the artist inserted himself into the flow of his own thoughts and transcribed them directly onto paper. Matta defined the automatic process as a ‘method of reading “live” the actual function of thinking at the same speed as the matter we are thinking of, to read at the speed of events, to grasp unconscious material functioning in our memory with the tools at our disposal. Automatism means the irrational and the rational are running parallel and can send sparks to each other and light the common road’ (quoted in Matta: Making the Invisible Visible, exh. cat., McMullen Museum of Art, Boston, 2004, p. 30). Executed in a complex, dynamic flow of vibrating strokes of colourful crayon, Projection des liquides des substances VI is a powerful example of the captivating sense of flux and spontaneity that dazzled the Surrealists, and led André Breton to proclaim Matta’s work during this period ‘a festival where all of the games of chance are played’ (writing in Minotaure, May 1939; quoted in ibid., p. 32).