ROBERTO MATTA

Roberto Matta was a Chilean who is tagged with being a surrealist.  And he operated with some transparency in his drawings. He was born in 1911, and actually died not all that long ago in 2002.  While his paintings are typically discussed, we are of course interested in his drawings.

In Chile, he studied both architecture and interior design.  He got linked up with the European surrealists while traveling as a merchant seaman.  He met many of the famous, including Corb, Breton, Gorky, Dali, etc.  Wikipedia states that his first “flowering” was when he shifted from drawing to painting.  But, as we would expect, his painting was nearly opaque, whereas his drawings have a interesting transparency to them.

Waddington characterizes him as being the most ‘scientific’ of the surrealists. p130.  Which makes complete sense: his transparency permitted a scientific level of knowledge.  His transparency revealed, to a certain degree, how things work.  Waddington goes on to say that Matta created scenes which manifested in free space.  So he was operating in that never never land between the two art terms in vogue then, representation and abstraction.

After entering ‘Roberto Matta Drawings’ into Google Images, an algorithmic selection of his drawings is presented.  I have taken the liberty of including two which I find most closely support the mode of Transparent Drawing.  And my drawing at the top of the page is, as you can see, closely mapped by Matta’s drawing above.  I wanted to follow his composition with reasonable fidelity so as to try to understand his spacetime.

What did I learn? Matta’s spacetime does not have the holistic integration that I look for. The all over composition breaks that down, which is what we would expect given the obvious dominance of representational spacetime in his thinking. Despite the overlapping shapes, the transparency does not distill into a cohesive spatial understanding. Still, it was fun to follow his moves as an attempt to get at that surrealist, floating, disintegrated spatial proclivity.

1.  Waddington, C. H. Behind Appearance. Edinburgh University Press. 1969.