(Santiago, Chile 1911–2002 Civitavecchia, Italy)
La Banale de Venise, 1954, signed; inscribed Banale Venezia 54 on the reverse, oil on canvas, 100 x 80 cm, framed

This work is registered in the Archives de l’oeuvre de Matta, Tarquinia and is accompanied by a photo certificate of authenticity

Provenance:
Galleria Schettini, Milan (label and stamp on the reverse)
Galleria d’Arte L’Attico, Rome (stamp on the reverse)
Galleria Arte 92, Milan
European Private Collection

Exhibited:
Milan, Le Invenzioni dello sguardo, Galleria Arte 92, 16 April–11 July 2015, exh. cat. pp. 48–49 with ill.

Quote:
“Matta is the one who most holds fast to his star, who is perhaps on the best path to the ultimate secret: the ability to control fire.”
André Breton, 1944.

There is a French term, the translation of which has no exact correspondence in other languages, and which seems to perfectly encapsulate the identity and poetics of Roberto Sebastián Matta Echaurren. The word flâneur, originally made famous by Baudelaire, indicates a person who wanders and gets lost voluntarily. Wandering and without defined goals, the flâneur “feeds” on everything around him; he experiences and absorbs the stimuli that society gives him. According to Balzac, flânerie is not a pose but a true discipline associated with walking, which the writer calls the “gastronomy of the eye”.
Roberto Matta is the art flâneur par excellence: a cosmopolitan and polyglot painter, which is why attempting to ascribe him to a single artistic current could be somewhat reductive. It is no coincidence that, in one of his last interviews with the press, when asked by a journalist who Matta really was, the Andean master’s reply was brief and concise: “I repeat, I know nothing about myself”.
The last surrealist with echoes of dynamism and futurism, the spiritual father of Abstract Expressionism, a visionary and dreamy symbolist? These are all correct categorisations but, in the end, they are also deeply constraining and limited. Matta’s art lives in a time of its own, which is the “time of life” made up of concatenations, interweavings and plots that are difficult to categorise.
This work, dated 1954, and whose title is an explicit and provocative allusion to the Italian art review, is a perfect transposition of the irrational cosmogony that makes up the fairy-tale universe of this modern Ulysses.
In these years of post-war reconstruction, the imagery used by Matta – who in this period would begin to settle with increasing assiduity in Italy – reveals a twofold tendency: on the one hand, we find an iconography that is loaded with monstrous figures, with a similar emotional charge to Baconian subjects and the strange mutant beings typical of Graham Sutherland’s painting; on the other hand, this schizoid dehumanisation is negated by Matta’s indulging in a mechanisation of form, capable of revealing a typically Duchampian influence (an artist with whom he had a long and constructive professional relationship).
The condition of the contemporary artist as a producer of objects on an assembly line seems to be the scenic hinge of this canvas: an artist constrained, depersonalised and alienated by a society that is increasingly mechanised and driven towards consumerism. In this work, with distant Chaplinesque echoes and in which even the acid colours lend a sense of heaviness, Matta truly seems to offer a sociological reading of a historical period of which he probably glimpsed the birth and of which Warhol would shortly become the greatest interpreter.