MATTA (1911-2002)

Roberto Matta’s Sans titre was executed in 1937, the period during which the young artist first began his Surrealist explorations. His journey towards Surrealism, however, was far from straightforward: Matta initially studied architecture in his native Chile before leaving, in 1933, to go work for Le Corbusier in Paris; already he was fascinated by ideas around intuition and chance – ideas advocated by André Breton in the first Surrealist Manifesto of 1924 – which informed both his nascent understanding of structural forms and, later, his aesthetic idiom. ‘I am very interested in chance,’ Matta noted. ‘For me, it is the best of things. It is a game between series. Chance rolls on and never stops’ (R. Matta interviewed by H. Ulrich Obrist, ‘Resistor: Surrealist Roberto Matta interviewed before his death’, Tate Research Publication, 2003, https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artists/matta-1594/resistor, accessed 12 December 2022).
But it was encounters with various members of the avant-garde, including Gertrude Stein, Federico García Lorca, and Salvador Dalí, that would push Matta firmly away from architecture and towards art, and specifically the Surrealist movement; by 1936, he had completely abandoned his previous career. Instead, he became invested in psychic automatism, or the act of writing and drawing in trancelike state in order to produce work freed from thought or self-censorship. On Lorca’s advice, in 1937, Dalí introduced Matta to Marcel Duchamp, Yves Tanguy, Joan Miró, and André Breton, who included Matta in the 1938 Surrealist exhibition. Breton became Matta’s champion, cementing his position amongst the Surrealists and acquiring several of his works including Sans titre. The present work is a marker of both their friendship, and Matta’s own artistic development.