Melodia - Melodio

Hand signed by the artist"Matta" in ink, lower right. Numbered "91/125" in ink, lower left. An impression from the edition of 125 aside from 35 artist proofs. Published by Nordstamp. In excellent condition, framed with museum quality conservation materials.

Roberto Sebastian Antonio Matta Echaurren (1911-2002) was born in Santiago, Chile. He studied architecture at The Pontificia Universidad Catolica de Chile, but became disillusioned with the occupation and moved to Paris in 1933.  From 1933-34 he worked in the studio of the acclaimed French architect, Le Corbusier. Originally an architectural draughtsman, Matta produced only drawings until the summer of 1938 when the artist met Gordon Onslow Ford, an influential American patron who encouraged him to begin painting. When World War II broke out, Matta was forced to flee Europe and arrived in New York in 1938 where he influenced a whole new generation of American artists.

Matta, who officially joined the Paris Surrealist movement in 1937, was known for his “psychological morphologies” psychological-time mediums in which the objects are in a state of transformation and “automatism” which emphasized the suppression of conscious control over a composition in order to give free reign to the unconscious imagery and associations. Matta used automatism in a manner that allowed one form to give rise to another until unification was achieved or until further elaboration destroyed the composition. According to Professor Claude Cernuschi, “Matta’s key ambition, to represent and evoke the human psyche, was filtered through the psychoanalytical view of the mind as a three-dimensional space: the ‘inscape.’”  According to Cernuschi’s research on Matta in Crosscurrents of Modernism, the inscapes’ organic and cosmic life forms are “visual analogies for the artist’s psyche.”  Although Matta was exiled from the Surrealist group in 1947, his artistic output remained true to his Surrealist origins.