Mysteries of the Morning

Among the best living arguments for abstractionism is a 40-year-old Chilean named Roberto Sebastian Antonio Matta Echaurren, who calls himself simply "Matta." He lives with his wife and baby boy in a sunny apartment in Rome, paints only when he feels like it, and spends most of his leisure time grinding a rented hand organ on the streets. The mechanical music he grinds out gives Matta and his small boy assistant little profit, but Matta enjoys watching the faces of his listeners at the sidewalk cafes. Matta's latest show, opening next week in Manhattan, will be the first chance the U.S. has had to see the results of his observations, painted in a new style that is as imaginative as it is mysterious.

Matta has covered a lot of ground since he first started painting 15 years ago. Born and brought up in Santiago, he went to Paris in the '30s, where he studied architecture under Le Corbusier. He got no architectural commissions, soon switched to painting. His first paintings went back to the beginning of time: flames, stars and rocks, all gleaming in primordial darkness. When he first introduced human life, he painted men that were half lobster, half electric chair, tormenting each other. "We are all monsters," Matta says, with absolute conviction. But the new subject of his art is what Matta variously describes as "the morning on earth," and "the real soul which is tenderness toward everything alive.

Matta best explains himself with paint on canvas, and it is obvious that what he has to say in his new show is richer and happier than previously. His ceiling-high canvas opposite displays a peacock softness and brilliance of color and a range of textures from cactus to satin. It creates the illusion of deep space, and hums with delicate, darting figures.

An elaborate craftsman, Matta deplores what he calls "the tubist painters--those who squirt paint senselessly onto canvas and those who are interested only in the verb 'to see.'" His own paintings, he insists, are not mere designs, but explorations of the verb "to be," i.e., they have to do with human existence. "I represent man," he says, "not as in a mirror, but as a force constantly changing. Man is 50% irrational. One half has been measured by mathematics; the other can be reached only through poetry."

Most abstractionists either shuffle geometrical figures or splash about hoping for happy accidents. Matta does neither. In a sense he is enlarging the bounds of abstract art by painting representationally. He pays as much attention to the representation of space and atmosphere, of light, shadow and shape, as the most uncompromising realist. So that while his pictures suggest no familiar, recognizable forms, they do produce a strange illusion of reality.

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