PRESENTATION: Roberto Matta-All Things Are Changing in All Dimensions

Roberto Matt (Roberto Sebastián Antonio Matta Echaurren) is considered one of the great Surrealists and is widely acclaimed for his critical and catalytic influence on the development of Abstract Expressionism and on his contemporaries. Fascinated by the fluctuating energy of the universe and rejecting the notion of a single vantage point, he created paintings and drawings with complex, dynamic space eventually incorporating social commentary into his work through figurative imagery.

By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Blum Gallery Archive

Born in Santiago, Chile in 1911, Roberto Matta would become an influential member of the surrealist movement, associating with figures like André Breton in the 1940s. Matta’s early interest in giving visual form to what he termed “psychological morphologies” was transformed by World War II, the Cold War, and Augusto Pinochet’s 1973 dictatorship in Chile. Those events and their aftermaths catalyzed Matta to take a more politically minded approach to painting. The artist once said, “I believe that before anything else we need an image of society, an image of economics, to help us to see where we are. Just as we need to refer to maps to locate ourselves in space, we have to find a way of depicting our position in history”. The exhibition “All Things Are Changing in All Dimensions”, shows rarely seen drawings, sculptures, and paintings spanning early 1950s to late 1990s. Roberto Matta was born in Chile and found his artistic destiny in 1930s Paris. A trained architect working in the studio of Le Corbusier, his paintings won over André Breton, who, in 1937, invited him to join the original surrealist movement. Relocating to New York City in the 1940s, he became the city’s link to historical surrealism, being a naturally loquacious artist and one of the few English-speaking émigrés in the community. Matta was a friend as well as a major inspiration to Robert Motherwell, Jackson Pollock, and Arshile Gorky, among others. He remained a supporter of other artists, encouraging Peter Saul and William Copley, while influencing the likes of Karl Wirsum and Carroll Dunham. Matta first explored Los Angeles in 1948 while showing at his friend William Copley’s eponymous gallery. Developing a language that he felt could capture the mutability of space and time as it appears in our shifting consciousness, he went on to investigate artistic galaxies no painter had traveled to before with decidedly cinematic works that foreshadowed the look and feel of science fiction and fantasy film spectaculars. His drawing practice happened across Paris, New York, Rome, and wherever he found himself. Each work was usually drawn in a single improvised session and considered complete; he rarely made drawings to plan paintings. Matta was attempting to think those thoughts about space and time on the page (or painting) itself, imagining the madness, irrationality, eros, horror, and beauty of life through matrices of the unnamable. In the 1950s, Matta developed his “vitreurs” (humanoids), seemingly made of glass, enacting rituals and behaviors in quasi-geometric arrangements of planes and transparent color forms. In the 1960s, Matta began drawing narrative images of protests, state violence, and revolution, and, later, sequences of images that imagine his beings engaged in debates, sex, transformation, and dance. These later humanoids increasingly resembled the fluid and life-like beings Matta would make in terracotta. This exhibition includes eight sculptures, seven of which have never been exhibited. These totemic objects populated his various homes like a civilization of his own making. Up until his last year, Matta continued innovating his formal language—composing horizontal spaces out of rectangular cubes and blending those with earthen spaces. His final and never-before-exhibited paintings, on view in the Garden Gallery, bring Matta back to his roots as an architect, imagining exploded geodesic polygons forming and unforming amidst a universe on the verge.  These images and Matta’s leftist beliefs made him a beacon for younger artists and groups for social change in the 1960s and 1970s.

Photo: Roberto Matta, Untitled, c. 1990, Terracotta, 51 1/2 x 59 x 16 3/4 inches, Photo: Hannah Mjølsnes, © Matta Archives, Courtesy Matta Archives and Blum Gallery

Info: Curators: Dan Nadel and Cornelius Tittel, Blum Gallery, 2727 South La Cienega Boulevard, Los Angeles, CA, USA, Duration: 18/5-29/6/2024, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-18:00, www.blum-gallery.com/