Research Assignment

ROBERTO MATTA

By: Jeff Smith

In Roberto Matta’s fluid drawings and painting between 1936 to 1959 are obsessed with the terrain of the mind and the nature’s shifting microcosms are closely brought together. During the 1940s in New York, Matta's Surrealist visions provided much of the connective tissue linking the Surrealist exiles with the burgeoning School of Abstract Expressionism
Matta was born in Chile in 1912. Originally he was trained in his native country as an architect and interior designer. He left for Paris in 1932 to work as a draftsman in the Paris studio of Le Corbousier. Through a letter of introduction from Frederico Garcia Lorca he met Salvador Dali, who suggested he show his drawings to Andre Breton. Matta joined the Surrealists in 1937, and exhibited in the major international Surrealist exhibit that opened in Paris in 1938. Because of the ominous threat of war, Matta left for New York in 1938--and produced his strongest works ever. Although a relative latecomer to Surrealism, Matta's eerie depictions of inner space highly influenced pivotal Abstract Expressionist painters such as Arshile Gorky and Robert Motherwell.

http://artscenecal.com/ArticlesFile/Archive/Articles1997/Articles0497/RMatta.html

As always, Matta's vision is a free flowing tribute to the ambiguities of the subconscious mind and to the complex web of the cosmos. The meandering beauty of his line makes his drawing a pleasure to behold. His paintings are replete with glowing colors and a biomorphic fluidity. All of his works transform and change with meditative viewing, revealing the rich inner life of a Surrealist artist immersed in the poetry of line, space, color and motion.

4a. His inspiration is the terrain of the mind and the nature’s shifting microcosms are closely brought together.
4b. He was trained as a architect and interior designer. And then he turned to painting.
5a. His paintings appear to people in many different ways. This is similar to the way that New Media is viewed today.
5b. The way he uses color really blows me away. And some of the drawings that I have seen of his is really great as well.
5c. What surprised me about this artist is that he was an architect and interior designer first and then went to painting.
5d. I could not find any thing that disappointed me about him.
5e. He changed my view of New Media by showing us how to use to bright colors.


Art work:
http://ia.utep.edu/Portals/304/Robert%20Matta%204.10.jpg
http://www.thecityreview.com/s00lats17.gif
http://web.ncf.ca/ek867/matta.lets.jpg
http://www.steamshovelpress.com/images/mattatheearth.jpg