“I’m not an artist.
I’m somebody who tries to construct images that will once help us realize the essence of the verb ‘to see’.”
Roberto Matta
Described by Marcel Duchamp as “the most profound painter of his generation”, Roberto Matta (Santiago, Chile, 1911 – Civitavecchia, 2002) was one of the most visionary artists of the twentieth century.
A friend of the Surrealists who, like him, migrated from Europe to New York at the outbreak of World War II, Matta soon became a key figure in contemporary painting. In his surrealist works, he broke the conceptual and constructive principles of spatial representation, opening it up to cosmic explosions and subjective implosions, inhabited by floating organic forms with bright, often acidic and bold colors.
This exhibition presents a selection of over twenty works created by the artist during his most creative and prolific years. These are works from the New York period (1939-1949), when Matta exhibited in the city's most important galleries and anticipated the innovations of Abstract Expressionism. Included are works from the 1950s, a time when, between Italy and Paris, the artist reached stylistic maturity. In this period, he developed his vision of the “open cube” and created cycles of large canvases marked by a cosmological epic, where the evolution of species, the dreamlike universe of the mind, and the mutations of nature in the infinitely small and infinitely large take shape.
After the major exhibitions dedicated to Leonor Fini, Stanislao Lepri, Tiger Tateishi, William Copley and Harold Stevenson, with this exhibition Tommaso Calabro continues to support the rediscovery and appreciation of artists associated with the Surrealist movement and the figure of Alexander Iolas.
