What art movement was the painter Roberto Matta associated with?
Roberto Matta was a Chilean surrealist painter. The painter Salvador Dalí encouraged the Chilean to show his drawings to André Breton, introducing the two to each other in 1937, after which Breton agreed to include Matta in the Surrealist group. The Chilean painter quickly appropriated elements of surrealist language and themes for his own work, exploring automatism, the unconscious, eroticism, poetic appeal, the search for a new future for humanity and revolutionary engagement. In the same year, the painter Roberto Matta met Picasso, who was then working on his famous painting Guernica. The gigantic work was an aesthetic revelation for Matta. When the English painter Gordon Onslow Ford lent Matta his materials, encouraging him to move from drawing to painting, the Chilean artist began to paint. The surrealist artist then produced the series Psychological Morphologies, experimenting with a new technique through which he first applied colour to the canvas using a cloth and then used a brush to create lines on the colour already in place. The process was inspired by the automatic writing technique practised by his surrealist friends. These canvases offered graphic translations of the psyche, fluxes that circulated in the world between humans and things.
Please visit the painter Roberto Matta’s dedicated page or the page on Surrealism to learn more about this art movement.
