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Lot Essay
This painting will be included in the forthcoming catalogue raisonné of the artist being prepared by Mme. Germana Ferrari-Matta under archive No. 38/11.
The present painting has been requested on loan for the upcoming exhibition titled: Matta: Making the Invisible Visible, Boston College, Jan. 15-June 14, 2004.
"La idea fija taladra cada minuto, el pensamiento teje y desteje la trama,
vas y vienes entre el espmritu de afuera y tu propio infinito.
Eres un hilo de la trama y un latido del minuto,
el ojo que taladra y el ojo tejedor.
Al entrar en ti mismo no sales del mundo, hay
rmos y volcanes en tu cuerpo, planetas y hormigas.
En tu sangre navegan imperios, turbinas, bibliotecas, jardines,
tambiin hay animales, plantas, seres de otros mundos, las galaxias
circulan en tus neuronas.
Al entrar en ti mismo entras en este mundo y en los otros mundos,
entras en lo que vio el astrsnomo en su telescopio,
el matematico en sus ecuaciones:
el desorden y la simetrma, el accidente y las
rimas, las duplicaciones y las mutaciones.
El vaivin de San-Guy del atomo y sus partmculas, las
cilulas reincidentes, las inscripciones estelares."
Octavio Paz (1)
While Duchamp stated that Matta was the most profound painter of his generation and Breton urged him to join the Surrealist movement in 1937; Gordon Onslow Ford was the person who developed a close kinship with Matta. Their friendship began in 1937 and extended throughout their life, yet it was in the first years of their encounter that the greatest ideas developed-during Matta's transition from architect to artist. Matta was working in Paris as a young architect in Le Corbusier's studio, and soon after a visit by Onslow Ford to his studio, he was persuaded to continue drawing, leave architecture aside and start painting.
The dialogue that developed between the two friends was instrumental in liberating Matta from the strict norms of architecture and allowed him to immerse himself in his extraordinary talented inner-self. During the summer of 1938 Onslow Ford invited Matta and his wife Anne to spend some time in Trévignon, Bretagne. This is the summer that both artists will particularly remember as the turning point of their aesthetic ideas. It was also right before Matta executed Morphology of Desire, one of the first and seminal paintings of the morphology series, painted upon his return from Bretagne.
Matta was fascinated with many subjects including mathematics, astronomy, and psychological sciences. Being highly eloquent, he expressed his interests through energetic colour crayon drawings or through lengthy conversations with his friends. Onslow Ford states that by the end of the summer of 1938 they discovered the frontiers of the unknown in modern art and launched themselves towards the adventure granted by automatism, guided by a poetic intuition. This allowed them to enter into the sublime, to discover the limits and possibilities of consciousness and sensorial perception.(2) It opened the door to a universe of possibilities where there was no limit to what man could express through artistic practices.
Morphology of Desire masterly depicts Matta's notion of man's inner world through the earth's volatile outer landscape. Not unlike the ancient philosophers, Matta believed in four elements that were seminal to every pictorial composition. These are a rock to suggest the earth; vegetation; man; and a man made object. In his Morphologies, and in particular in Morphology of Desire the four elements appear surrounded by a cosmic atmosphere of blue and white paint. The objects are energetic and turbulent renderings of incendiary colour emphasising Matta's interest in the destructive and creative processes of nature while biomorphic shapes evoke the seminal, the organic and the primitive.
La casa de la mirada by Octavio Paz written for the Matta exhibition at the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, 1985
Onslow Ford, G. Notes sur Matta et la peinture (1937-1941), Matta, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, 1958, p.p. 27-30
The present painting has been requested on loan for the upcoming exhibition titled: Matta: Making the Invisible Visible, Boston College, Jan. 15-June 14, 2004.
"La idea fija taladra cada minuto, el pensamiento teje y desteje la trama,
vas y vienes entre el espmritu de afuera y tu propio infinito.
Eres un hilo de la trama y un latido del minuto,
el ojo que taladra y el ojo tejedor.
Al entrar en ti mismo no sales del mundo, hay
rmos y volcanes en tu cuerpo, planetas y hormigas.
En tu sangre navegan imperios, turbinas, bibliotecas, jardines,
tambiin hay animales, plantas, seres de otros mundos, las galaxias
circulan en tus neuronas.
Al entrar en ti mismo entras en este mundo y en los otros mundos,
entras en lo que vio el astrsnomo en su telescopio,
el matematico en sus ecuaciones:
el desorden y la simetrma, el accidente y las
rimas, las duplicaciones y las mutaciones.
El vaivin de San-Guy del atomo y sus partmculas, las
cilulas reincidentes, las inscripciones estelares."
Octavio Paz (1)
While Duchamp stated that Matta was the most profound painter of his generation and Breton urged him to join the Surrealist movement in 1937; Gordon Onslow Ford was the person who developed a close kinship with Matta. Their friendship began in 1937 and extended throughout their life, yet it was in the first years of their encounter that the greatest ideas developed-during Matta's transition from architect to artist. Matta was working in Paris as a young architect in Le Corbusier's studio, and soon after a visit by Onslow Ford to his studio, he was persuaded to continue drawing, leave architecture aside and start painting.
The dialogue that developed between the two friends was instrumental in liberating Matta from the strict norms of architecture and allowed him to immerse himself in his extraordinary talented inner-self. During the summer of 1938 Onslow Ford invited Matta and his wife Anne to spend some time in Trévignon, Bretagne. This is the summer that both artists will particularly remember as the turning point of their aesthetic ideas. It was also right before Matta executed Morphology of Desire, one of the first and seminal paintings of the morphology series, painted upon his return from Bretagne.
Matta was fascinated with many subjects including mathematics, astronomy, and psychological sciences. Being highly eloquent, he expressed his interests through energetic colour crayon drawings or through lengthy conversations with his friends. Onslow Ford states that by the end of the summer of 1938 they discovered the frontiers of the unknown in modern art and launched themselves towards the adventure granted by automatism, guided by a poetic intuition. This allowed them to enter into the sublime, to discover the limits and possibilities of consciousness and sensorial perception.(2) It opened the door to a universe of possibilities where there was no limit to what man could express through artistic practices.
Morphology of Desire masterly depicts Matta's notion of man's inner world through the earth's volatile outer landscape. Not unlike the ancient philosophers, Matta believed in four elements that were seminal to every pictorial composition. These are a rock to suggest the earth; vegetation; man; and a man made object. In his Morphologies, and in particular in Morphology of Desire the four elements appear surrounded by a cosmic atmosphere of blue and white paint. The objects are energetic and turbulent renderings of incendiary colour emphasising Matta's interest in the destructive and creative processes of nature while biomorphic shapes evoke the seminal, the organic and the primitive.
La casa de la mirada by Octavio Paz written for the Matta exhibition at the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, 1985
Onslow Ford, G. Notes sur Matta et la peinture (1937-1941), Matta, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, 1958, p.p. 27-30