Unfolding across nine rooms, the exhibition dedicated to the Chilean artist and key figure of Surrealism goes beyond the surface of the works, delving into the irrationality of the unconscious.
“Matta’s visionary energy […] is an overwhelming sense for comedy […] an element of ruthless, sarcastic modern transfiguration […] a primordial force, such that for him, comedy and tragedy are one and the same, the playing out of total human commitment.” Thus, Italian author Italo Calvino on Roberto Matta. The first exhibition on Chilean artist Roberto Matta ever produced in Italy. Coming up at the Modern Art Museum in Ca’ Pesaro and curated by Normal Rosenthal, Dawn Ades, and Elisabetta Barisoni, this exhibition is a voyage into Matta’s eclectic, visionary mind.
The artist, of Basque ancestry, was a world citizen who lived in Paris, worked with le Corbusier, met García Lorca, Dalì, Breton. A protagonist of Surrealism, his canvases break two-dimensionality and take us into the fourth dimension, the dimension of mind, and explore the irrationality of the subconscious. Matta gave pure psychic automatism, once theorized by André Breton as the ‘real mode of operation of the mind’, an essential role within the conventional opposition of figuration and abstraction. In those years, the surrealists met in New York, and it was Matta who introduced Pollock, Motherwell, Baziotes, and Lee Krasner to the technique of automatic drawing. Freedom of gesture allowed the artist to overcome the known boundaries of art and to let shapes float in a non-descript space. Psychological morphology turns into eerie visions that conceal Roberto Matta’s political activism, like the war in Algeria hiding behind his 1958 piece La Question, a cry against the growing Nazi horror, or his large canvas Chasse aux adolescents, a reflection of his participation in May 68 in Paris.
A tireless, curious world citizen, Roberto Matta had to have a place in Venice. In fact, he debuted in town in the 1948 Biennale thanks to Peggy Guggenheim. His art was included in the historical production at the Greek Pavilion. Matta would be back in Venice in 1953, and in that occasion, the City bought his Dawn on Earth for its Modern Art Museum’s collection. Matta’s political commitment inspired his artistic interpretations on the themes of ecology and sustainability, which recur in his ironic subjects populating his large paintings as well as in his exhibition stagings. Matta made a point of reusing and recycling materials. A sort of fourth dimension is the home of design items, like the polyurethane Malitte seats that seem to have popped out of the background painting and to allude to a garden of Eden that will welcome visitors and take them into the mesmerizing world of science fiction.
