Since de Kooning has passed away,
who is the world's greatest living
painter? More than a few people
would answer "Matta," the artist
born in Chile, who is one of the
few survivors of the original
Surrealist group. His first
creative impulse was as an
architect, but he turned to
painting in the '30s while living
in Europe. Dalí and Garcia Lorca
introduced him to André Breton,
who invited the young artist to
illustrate the last Surrealist
Manifesto.
Now an 86-year-old resident of
Mexico, Roberto Matta is painting
with a vitality, if not fury, that
would probably exhaust most 26-
year-olds. In each of the nine
recent, large-scale works on view
here, Matta continues his eloquent
exploration of light and space.
Looking at a Matta painting is
like peering into a telescope and
a microscope simultaneously.
The psychedelic colors and wild
gestures in canvases such as
Selfnity and Oceame help the
artist bring his vision of the
microcosm and macrocosm to life.
The Wols-ish Countrepoint de la
Luminere and the brilliant red
Inside Light, demonstrate Matta's
seemingly effortless manipulation
of textures and translucent layers
of color, which convey a
contradictory sense of airy depth
and surface grit. When Matta
describes figures, the results may
seem like imaginative space
aliens. They are, however, very
human, in fact, some are self-
portraits.
Ultimately, Matta is an idealist.
In all of the works on view here,
he exudes a passionate love for
this planet, for humankind, and
for painting. "Art is a desire to
exist in the universe because we
are made of the same atoms as the
stars," he says in the show's
catalogue. "When a star dies, it
dies in light--giving light; and I
believe that the death of a human
being is somehow similar, except
that we do not have photographs of
such light."
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