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拍品專文
This work is sold with a certificate of authenticity signed by Germana Matta Ferrari and dated 26 September 2013.
One of the most singular figures in the history of surrealism, Matta arrived in Paris as an architectural student in 1935. But the intrepid artist soon abandoned those aspirations as he came into contact with many of the leading members of the modern vanguard--the writers Gabriela Mistral, Pablo Neruda, and Federico García Lorca, as well as several of the Surrealists with whom he would forge meaningful relationships--Gordon Onslow Ford, Salvador Dalí, André Breton, Marcel Duchamp, and Yves Tanguy. The latter two would be particularly influential to Matta--Duchamp for his concept of "passage" and Tanguy for his fluid, horizonless spaces. Matta also absorbed the mathematical theories of Jules Henri Poincare whose groundbreaking three-dimensional algebraic models coupled with the writings of Peter D. Ouspensky regarding the limitations of visual perception and of traditional three-dimensional geometries provided the theoretical framework for the artist's pursuit of the fourth dimension. The latter understood as Matta's desire to visually represent "the unseen realities underlying human existence by conjoining several phases of growth and evolution within a single image rendered within a fluid, non-Euclidian space."[1]
The impact of these aforementioned encounters and diverse sources was quickly felt by Matta and by 1937 he had completely embraced painting--a decision that would not only transform his life irretrievably but would ultimately catapult him into the center of the international vanguard making him one of the most influential and visionary artists of the first half of the twentieth century. In 1938 Matta officially joined the Surrealists and a year later, prompted by the massive conflict unfolding in Europe, fled to New York where he would remain until 1948. New York solidified Matta's paradigmatic role and catapulted his status as a central figure in the development of the nascent New York School as well as among a number of his contemporaries, including Jackson Pollock, Arshile Gorky, Mark Rothko, and Robert Motherwell.
Executed in 1943, La rosa, although intimate in scale possesses all of the trademark elements that by the mid-1940s had become hallmarks of Matta's production. Abstract topographies or "morphologies" comprised of diaphanous layers of bright colors (here vibrant hues of green, red, orange, black, and yellow) set against a gelatinous, limitless, and horizonless background that suggests an infinite and ineffable cosmos-spaces heretofore unknown, unimagined, or yet to be discovered. In this work, Matta's volcanic imagery takes on the guise of pulsating forms, nebulous tissues or membranes derived from human or plant life, and projectile-like splashes of color that imbue this work with a decidedly erotic edge consistent with the artist's belief in the continuum of natural phenomena and his vision of the earth as a sexually charged mass of energy in perpetual state of transformation and regeneration. The painting's title, La rosa is reminiscent of the surrealist penchant for verbal puns or double entendres and recalls Duchamp's pseudonym Rrose Sélavy, a play on words intended to sound like the French phrase "Eros, c'est la vie" ("Eros, that's life"). Here Matta pays a veiled homage to Duchamp while further underscoring the sensual nature of this painting--a work that is overflowing with the persistent and primordial forces of life, creation, and evolution.
1 See Elizabeth A.T. Smith and Colette Dartnall, "'Crushed Jewels, Air, Even Laughter': Matta in the 1940s" in exhibition catalogue Matta in America: Paintings and Drawings of the 1940s (Chicago: Museum of Contemporary Art and Los Angeles: Museum of Contemporary Art, 2001), 12.
One of the most singular figures in the history of surrealism, Matta arrived in Paris as an architectural student in 1935. But the intrepid artist soon abandoned those aspirations as he came into contact with many of the leading members of the modern vanguard--the writers Gabriela Mistral, Pablo Neruda, and Federico García Lorca, as well as several of the Surrealists with whom he would forge meaningful relationships--Gordon Onslow Ford, Salvador Dalí, André Breton, Marcel Duchamp, and Yves Tanguy. The latter two would be particularly influential to Matta--Duchamp for his concept of "passage" and Tanguy for his fluid, horizonless spaces. Matta also absorbed the mathematical theories of Jules Henri Poincare whose groundbreaking three-dimensional algebraic models coupled with the writings of Peter D. Ouspensky regarding the limitations of visual perception and of traditional three-dimensional geometries provided the theoretical framework for the artist's pursuit of the fourth dimension. The latter understood as Matta's desire to visually represent "the unseen realities underlying human existence by conjoining several phases of growth and evolution within a single image rendered within a fluid, non-Euclidian space."[1]
The impact of these aforementioned encounters and diverse sources was quickly felt by Matta and by 1937 he had completely embraced painting--a decision that would not only transform his life irretrievably but would ultimately catapult him into the center of the international vanguard making him one of the most influential and visionary artists of the first half of the twentieth century. In 1938 Matta officially joined the Surrealists and a year later, prompted by the massive conflict unfolding in Europe, fled to New York where he would remain until 1948. New York solidified Matta's paradigmatic role and catapulted his status as a central figure in the development of the nascent New York School as well as among a number of his contemporaries, including Jackson Pollock, Arshile Gorky, Mark Rothko, and Robert Motherwell.
Executed in 1943, La rosa, although intimate in scale possesses all of the trademark elements that by the mid-1940s had become hallmarks of Matta's production. Abstract topographies or "morphologies" comprised of diaphanous layers of bright colors (here vibrant hues of green, red, orange, black, and yellow) set against a gelatinous, limitless, and horizonless background that suggests an infinite and ineffable cosmos-spaces heretofore unknown, unimagined, or yet to be discovered. In this work, Matta's volcanic imagery takes on the guise of pulsating forms, nebulous tissues or membranes derived from human or plant life, and projectile-like splashes of color that imbue this work with a decidedly erotic edge consistent with the artist's belief in the continuum of natural phenomena and his vision of the earth as a sexually charged mass of energy in perpetual state of transformation and regeneration. The painting's title, La rosa is reminiscent of the surrealist penchant for verbal puns or double entendres and recalls Duchamp's pseudonym Rrose Sélavy, a play on words intended to sound like the French phrase "Eros, c'est la vie" ("Eros, that's life"). Here Matta pays a veiled homage to Duchamp while further underscoring the sensual nature of this painting--a work that is overflowing with the persistent and primordial forces of life, creation, and evolution.
1 See Elizabeth A.T. Smith and Colette Dartnall, "'Crushed Jewels, Air, Even Laughter': Matta in the 1940s" in exhibition catalogue Matta in America: Paintings and Drawings of the 1940s (Chicago: Museum of Contemporary Art and Los Angeles: Museum of Contemporary Art, 2001), 12.