It is the first time that Pablo Echaurren, the eldest surviving son of Matta, has agreed to exhibit alongside his father. “The fact that my brother Gordon — the middle one — was also included in the show was decisive for me,” he reveals from Italy, where he has lived all his life.
The exhibition, “Roberto Sebastian Matta, Gordon Matta-Clark, Pablo Echaurren,” part of the official program of the 55th Venice Biennale, opened on May 28 at the Fondazione Querini Stampalia. This historic institution, dating back to the mid-19th century, is housed in a Renaissance palace just steps away from St. Mark’s Square.
Organized by Galleria d’Arte Maggiore from Bologna, the exhibition features around eighty works: early drawings and paintings by Matta from the 1930s and 1940s, works from the 1970s and recent pieces by the multidisciplinary artist Echaurren, and photographs by Matta-Clark.
Curator Danilo Eccher highlights the poetic vision shared among “Matta’s surrealist dream, Echaurren’s irreverent drawings, and Matta-Clark’s corrosions of mental architecture.” Despite their different languages and personalities, Eccher sees in them a common feeling — that of “champions of utopia.”
For Pablo Echaurren, what unites the three is their political engagement: “The constant struggle against art as a market commodity. The desire to use art as a tool, not as an end in itself. Art is not just an object to contemplate or hang above the sofa, but a lens through which one can understand reality,” he says.Gordon Matta-Clark, son from Matta’s first marriage, died in 1978 at just 35. He lived in New York, where he became a cult artist, known for his building cuts and urban interventions — profound reflections on society. Although he did not have a close relationship with his father, their works have been shown together after their deaths — notably at the San Diego Museum of Art in 2006 — suggesting deep analogies in their representation of psychological and architectural space.
“Being close to Gordon in this exhibition feels like recreating a family that never really existed. It comforts me deeply,” says Echaurren, born in 1951, the only son of Matta and Italian actress Angela Franda. The painter, sculptor, and collector recalls exchanging letters with his brother since childhood: “Gordon used to send me letters from the United States with drawings of cowboys — for me, that was the America of my films, my dreams...”He first discovered Gordon’s early works in Paris, where their father lived, “without seeing them, through the stories my father told about him and Batan (Gordon’s twin) — like a fantastic tale.”
Regarding his father, he explains that there was never a rupture or conflict, only distance — and for him, that distance became the beginning of a silent dialogue between them, a visual conversation. “All the filaments of DNA began to flow and spread, here and there, on canvas, on paper, in photographs. Yes, my father’s work — I have inherited it,” he concludes.
