“I believe every artist has been sent on Earth to create a mythology, or to recreate in original form some primordial myth, and that throughout their life, all their research is some kind of Odyssey”. It does look like an Odyssey, indeed, what we see at the Ca’ Pesaro Museum: a collection of art by Chilean surrealist Roberto Matta (1911–2002). The exhibition begins in medias res, with the robotic, spaceship-age fantasies of Coïgitum (1972), a thirty-foot surrealist Colossus generating metal spores that seem to be piercing through the canvas.

From here, a thematic and chronological loop embraces Matta’s production, from his early years in Paris to his meeting with le Corbusier’s architecture, which left a permanent mark on his spatial approach. By the 1940s, the artist grew closer to politics, first with an interest on man’s condition of loneliness in mass society, then with staunch communist militancy, leaving a heritage of art as a detector and revealer of social reflection.