Biographies

Roberto studied at the college of the Scared Heart in Santiago before frequenting the art section at the Catholic University. He opened a studio of architectural design in 1928 and obtained a diploma in architecture three years later but gave up his business in 1932 preferring to visit Europe, notably Italy, Spain, Yugoslavia, Russia and England.

Matta then moved to Paris and worked during several years with Le Corbusier, a famous Swiss-born architect and painter. He also worked in London with Gropius and Moholy-Nagy and met Henry Moore and René Magritte.

Much attracted by esoterism and by Marcel Duchamp's works Matta met Salvador Dali, André Breton and Yves Tanguy and started to produce Surrealist works. Breton notably bought two of his drawings while the Surrealist group soon adopted this charming and rather provocative young man who always used to wear white suits.

Matta took part in the construction of the Spanish pavilion at the Paris International Exhibition of 1937, met Picasso and befriended Gordon Onslow-Ford, an Englishman who induced him to turn to painting.

He exhibited his works at the International Surrealist Exhibition of 1938 and moved to New York at the outbreak of the Second World War joining Breton, André Masson, Mondrian, Léger and Ozenfant who had also fled from France.

Matta worked for the magazines “View” in 1941 and “VVV” in 1942 and 1944 and took part in the “First Papers of Surrealism” exhibition.

His first one-man exhibition was held at the J. levy Gallery while the Museum of Modern bought his painting “Listen Live” in 1941.

Matta travelled with Robert Motherwell to Mexico where he discovered volcanic landscapes while his bouncing imagination, his talent regarding technique and his automatic surrealist touch much impressed Arshile Gorky, Jackson Pollock and Franz Kline.

Together with Masson he had a deep influence over many New York painters and enabled the blossoming of Modern American Art. Still he himself was influenced by the immensity of American landscapes that was reflected in many Abstract-Expressionist paintings produced by the new American school.

Matta took part in numerous exhibitions in Paris, Sao Paulo, Bologna, London, Lima, Santiago, Caracas, Dusseldorf, Havana, Amsterdam, Brussels, Lucern, Berlin, Barcelona, Valencia, Madrid, Bilbao and New York notably.

He also produced pastels, sculptures (shown for the first time in Paris in 1950), engravings and scores of illustrations.

His first drawings showed the influence of Tanguy and enabled him to be recognised as a true surrealist artist. His first paintings, produced in 1938 in the village of Trevignon, Brittany, were described by him as “Psychological Morphologies” or as “Inscapes” (internal landscapes) corresponded to Breton's wish of “Absolute Automatism”.

Matta expressed a dream world with an acute representation of perspective seizing the world with gestures as he felt that everything was a gesture provoking emotions and desires. He thus opposed various gestures, which were his first language in an attitude of contemplation.

After his trip to Mexico he adopted the “Cosmic chaos” concept and the violent effects of yellow, orange and green colours finding a new powerful manner in monumental compositions with great skilfulness such as in “The Earth is a Man” of 1941, “The Apple of knowledge” of 1943 or “To escape absolute or science” or “Eros' Vertigo” of 1944.

Forms became more elusive with his suggestive representation of the universe in four dimensions, which concerned Breton or Duchamp very much. With exuberant and fluid forms, fine and spasmodic lines and strange and gloomy colours Matta in fact amplified the influence Duchamp had on him.

Much reminiscent of Breton's “Great transparencies”, his geometric constellations filled with molecular organs often appeared in his works while from 1944 fluid figures appeared in his pictorial science-fiction universe.

During the second part of his career, which started with his American period, the world cataclysm was echoed with deep resonance in his works. After discovering the horrors of Nazi death camps Matta decided to defend man and to express his struggle. “To invent the world means that scandal invites you to never rest”, he stressed.

After his exclusion from the Surrealist movement Matta introduced some social and political contents in his works notably regarding liberation struggles in Cuba, Algeria and Viet Nam.

It was during a stay in Sicily when he saw men confronted to misery that he decided to give a political dimension to his actions. As a result he changed his style and came nearer to terrestrial daily life showing men as victims with putrefying bodies represented with heavy layers of colours with the addition of translucent synthetic resins.

After joining back the Surrealist movement he strove to conciliate his surrealist faith with his political action feeling that Surrealism could help him find more reality and that being conscious of the role of all kinds of objects he could carry out the social and economic emancipation of the world and of the spirit of man.

Without renouncing his generous motivations he gave up the allusive figurative form and returned to his previous manner that had made him famous.

With several Mexican mural painters, Torres-Garcia and many other Latin American artists Matta has been the great promoter of South American art throughout the world. He also contributed to associate surrealism and abstraction and recuperated the art of science-fiction comic strips thus participating in the emergence of Pop Art.

Matta's works have underlined the problem of the insertion of plastic expressions in social and political struggles though he has never offered any tangible solution limiting himself to producing giant artistic shows like a virtuoso full of imagination, creating the most incredible fantasy world in the field of painting.

So far Matta has failed to help achieve any revolutionary action in any country but has once retorted that missing others was to miss one's own life. He has thought that there is a project to bring about for man, though not sensed at present and recalled that people waited for a long time to admit that the shape of the earth was round. In his view a social revolution can only be possible through a major global change regarding thinking that would enable the masses to have access to a non-demagogic and liberating form of culture. But as Jacques Busse pinpointed in the Benezit dictionary of artists, there is still a dilemma concerning Matta's reflection: “if an alienated spirit cannot have the means to implement his physical liberation then can an alienated body have the means to obtain his spiritual liberation?" Busse asked.