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拍品专文
Roberto Matta, one of the most important Latin American Surrealists, was coming into his full maturity as an artist when he executed this exquisite painting in 1938. Matta left his native Chile in 1935, arriving in Paris where he began to work for the architect Le Corbusier, although he would soon be led in a vastly different direction. Family ties brought him to Madrid where he met the famed Spanish poet Federico García Lorca, a momentous encounter that unleashed Matta’s creative energy and the following few years would be an exciting period of self-discovery and experimentation for the artist. In 1936 he met two more poets that would inform his artistic vision, fellow Chileans Pablo Neruda and Gabriela Mistral. Mistral in particular, with her mystical and revolutionary spirit, influenced Matta’s intellectual growth while the tragedy of Lorca’s death in the Spanish Civil War propelled him to meet Salvador Dalí in 1937. Dalí in turn introduced him to the leader of Surrealism, André Breton and later on that year he met Marcel Duchamp, Yves Tanguy and Joan Miró. Breton, who was immediately enamored with the young artist, asked Matta to contribute to the Surrealist exhibition at the Galerie des Beaux-Arts in Paris that January 1938.
Matta embraced the surrealist method of automatism, exploring the visual possibilities resulting from spontaneous and free movements of the hand, which was conducive to the formation of his own particular biomorphic style. The rest of 1938 for Matta was an exciting period of intense exploration and development, often in the company of other young surrealists, such as Gordon Onslow Ford with whom he spent the summer on the coast of Brittany. Together they became interested in the writings of the Russian occultist P.D. Ouspensky, particularly his book Tertium Organum, as well as the writings of the French mathematician Jules Henri Poincare. These texts led the artist to explore notions of visual perception and the limitations of three-dimensional space and would spark in Matta a life-long quest to find the artistic means to portray unseen dimensions, the passage of time, processes of transformation and other esoteric concepts. He experimented with new materials and techniques, such as pouring and rubbing thin washes of paint onto the canvas and then later going in to pick out discerned forms with a brush.
Matta was further inspired to visually investigate a new type of dimensional space, one that used articulated abstraction to suggest the workings of the mind as well as visionary realms. The resulting series of paintings were called psychological morphologies and in them Matta attempted nothing less than to pictorialize consciousness itself. These “inscapes” contained key concepts that would inform his entire subsequent painting practice. This untitled painting from his early psychological morphologies series was executed during this pivotal period of experimentation and philosophical development. Within this “inscape” scene (a horizon line divides a blue “sky” from a yellow “earth”) slippages from one psychic plane to another manifest before our very eyes. Thin veils of amorphous color washes flow in multivalent layers while jewel-like flickers of intense color punctuate the surface like abstract flames. It is as if this painting flowed from the artist’s hand while he was in an unconscious, trance-like state revealing the pulsating sexual energy underlying the natural world. The surface is remarkably complex, with subtle shifts in tonality, scratching, dripping, and rubbing that all coalesce to present us with an alien world where normative notions of space and time no longer apply. It is a distillation of the psychic forces at play in Matta’s mind at the time, full of visionary experimentation that merged inner and outer worlds. The next year, 1939, will see the artist leaving war-torn Europe for New York where he would immerse himself in the American art scene. Matta remained in New York City until 1948 and during his stay left an indelible mark on the formation of modern art in this country.
Susan Aberth, Edith C. Blum Professor of Art History, Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, New York
Matta embraced the surrealist method of automatism, exploring the visual possibilities resulting from spontaneous and free movements of the hand, which was conducive to the formation of his own particular biomorphic style. The rest of 1938 for Matta was an exciting period of intense exploration and development, often in the company of other young surrealists, such as Gordon Onslow Ford with whom he spent the summer on the coast of Brittany. Together they became interested in the writings of the Russian occultist P.D. Ouspensky, particularly his book Tertium Organum, as well as the writings of the French mathematician Jules Henri Poincare. These texts led the artist to explore notions of visual perception and the limitations of three-dimensional space and would spark in Matta a life-long quest to find the artistic means to portray unseen dimensions, the passage of time, processes of transformation and other esoteric concepts. He experimented with new materials and techniques, such as pouring and rubbing thin washes of paint onto the canvas and then later going in to pick out discerned forms with a brush.
Matta was further inspired to visually investigate a new type of dimensional space, one that used articulated abstraction to suggest the workings of the mind as well as visionary realms. The resulting series of paintings were called psychological morphologies and in them Matta attempted nothing less than to pictorialize consciousness itself. These “inscapes” contained key concepts that would inform his entire subsequent painting practice. This untitled painting from his early psychological morphologies series was executed during this pivotal period of experimentation and philosophical development. Within this “inscape” scene (a horizon line divides a blue “sky” from a yellow “earth”) slippages from one psychic plane to another manifest before our very eyes. Thin veils of amorphous color washes flow in multivalent layers while jewel-like flickers of intense color punctuate the surface like abstract flames. It is as if this painting flowed from the artist’s hand while he was in an unconscious, trance-like state revealing the pulsating sexual energy underlying the natural world. The surface is remarkably complex, with subtle shifts in tonality, scratching, dripping, and rubbing that all coalesce to present us with an alien world where normative notions of space and time no longer apply. It is a distillation of the psychic forces at play in Matta’s mind at the time, full of visionary experimentation that merged inner and outer worlds. The next year, 1939, will see the artist leaving war-torn Europe for New York where he would immerse himself in the American art scene. Matta remained in New York City until 1948 and during his stay left an indelible mark on the formation of modern art in this country.
Susan Aberth, Edith C. Blum Professor of Art History, Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, New York