20th Century Art In Venice three generations, and three private stories, brought together for the first time
Art within the family. A fine idea by Danilo Eccher to bring together in a single exhibition the works of Roberto Sebastián Matta (Santiago de Chile, 1911–Civitavecchia, 2002) and his sons Gordon Matta-Clark (New York, 1943–1978) and Pablo Echaurren Matta (Rome, 1951): paintings, sculptures, photographs, drawings. Alongside the Matta family, a good part of the protagonists of over half a century of art in Chile, France, America, and Italy.
What do Roberto Sebastián, Gordon, and Pablo have in common? Everything and nothing. Perhaps, at the beginning, the sons breathed in the same atmosphere of imagination, inventions, discoveries at home; but then something broke the spell and each went his own way. Never, as in this case, has the biography of each played such a quick and—in certain respects, as with Gordon—dramatic role in shaping the way they made art.
Of the three, the most famous is certainly the father, to whom another exhibition (The Origin Is Now) is dedicated at the Civic Gallery of Savona (until September 1), curated by Silvia Pegoraro.
Chilean, the son of Basque immigrants, after studying architecture, Matta the father arrived in Paris. He was 22 and eager for life and work. He entered Le Corbusier’s studio. But it was André Breton’s Surrealism that attracted him, as well as Dalí’s oddball Surrealism, which introduced him to Federico García Lorca, Marcel Duchamp and Man Ray.
Chilean, the son of Basque immigrants, after studying architecture, Matta the father arrived in Paris. He was 22 and eager for life and work. He entered Le Corbusier’s studio. But it was André Breton’s Surrealism that attracted him, as well as Dalí’s oddball Surrealism, which introduced him to Federico García Lorca, Marcel Duchamp and Man Ray.
Surrealism fulfilled the visionary impulse of the young Chilean, forcing him to reassess the reality that kept slipping away from him. His paintings pleased Breton, who called them “a pearl that grows in an avalanche, attracting to itself every physical and mental glimmer.” Breton’s creed infiltrated his way of thinking and expressing himself. A few examples? A critic asked him: “Who do you think you resemble?” Matta replied: “I think I am Charlie Chaplin.” And another, asking: “Who are you, really?” — “Perhaps a character out of a novel. If I ever existed.”
His imagination travelled down futuristic paths, where he grafted the popular myths of his homeland, pushing forward until he brushed the grotesque, the absurd. His paintings became populated with strange animals (not accounted for in zoological texts), strange machines, strange origins of the world (“The origin looks much the same for everyone. In a certain sense, we are all born in blood and shit; then they wash you and you might become a lawyer, or something else”), strange scentless flowers, strange birds, strange devices like nuclear or electrical power stations, strange insects. The result? A fantastical architecture, far removed from clichés or traditional painting, that made him re-evaluate space somewhat like the Renaissance artists.
Surrealist, yes. But sui generis, because for him Surrealism never ended; it merely transformed over time. For him it was no longer a movement but a way of living. He applied it even to words. He loved twisting and reinventing them. Ceramica became c’era mica; goduria e delizia of flowers became Godizia, which he would then break down into Godi, zia (“Enjoy, Auntie”). And rightly so: in Paris lived a real aunt of Matta, a friend of Picasso, Satie, Debussy and Diaghilev, fond of high society. In 1930 he moved to Madrid. Matta recalled: “She was very beautiful and I wanted to go to bed with her, but she wouldn’t—because, she said, she was my mother’s age.”
And what about his relationship with his sons? There were difficult relations between Sebastián Matta and Gordon, soon abandoned along with his mother. The father did not recognize his work, because it did not interest him. Gordon’s reaction—also trained as an architect? He rejected his father’s painting and turned to photography. As a boy he played in the streets of New York, among the abandoned buildings of SoHo. His images reveal a mute rebellion against perspective and structure (clearly a rebellion against the father). He dissected everything, cut through it. Light and air had to pass through uninhabited buildings, shake them, give them life. Gordon hurled himself into a kind of urban archaeology with altered perspectives and no horizon lines. He slipped through fissures. A pancreatic tumor took him at only thirty-five. SoHo lost its bard.
In Pablo Echaurren, art marries politics. Born in Rome, he learned about Duchamp and visual poetry from Gianfranco Baruchello. At twenty he began painting small squares that appealed to Arturo Schwarz, who encouraged him and bought everything. Then came the adventure with Lotta Continua. At Adriano Sofri’s invitation, he illustrated page after page of the newspaper. Slogans and comics were inserted into the small squares. “The reality of politics is more important than painting,” he said. Pablo also took part in the Metropolitan Indians movement, and sided with supporters of Fluxus, Gruppo 70, Gruppo 63 and visual poetry. “They thought they were Dadaists,” Maurizio Calvesi remarked. “In reality they were Futurists.”
Here lies the element he shares with his father: Futurism. Everything else: Pablo remains faithful to his ideas—“To transform our piazzas into palettes and our boulevards into paintbrushes.” As Mayakovsky said.
