“I want to show the contradictions in matter, to show that the world is made of movements generated by every being that seeks to possess what he is not, to identify with his opposite. [...]”

After his childhood in Chile, Roberto Sebastián Matta frequently travelled back and forth between Europe and America. He started out as an architect in Le Corbusier’s Paris studio, but soon turned his back on this and began to tackle the “4th dimension” on canvas. At just twenty-six he was drawn to Surrealism by Salvador Dalí, to whom Federico García Lorca had given him a letter of introduction. His interest in non-Euclidean geometry was aroused by Tertium Organum by Pëtr D. Ouspensky and Jules Henri Poincaré’s mathematical theories. 

This brief profile of Matta already reveals the intensity of his personal and professional life. Though he remained a faithful adherent to the technique of automatism he had already adopted in Paris at the end of the 1930s, during his career of over six decades he changed his artistic language several times, explored different avenues of research and replaced “psychological morphologies” with “social morphologies”. In 1948 he was expelled from the movement founded by André Breton for “intellectual disqualification and moral ignominy”. This decision was based on the suspicion that his liaison with Arshile Gorky’s wife had contributed to the artist’s suicide. 

After spending ten years in New York, where he had influenced the work of the new abstract generation, Matta arrived in Italy in 1949. The Roman environment steeped in social ferment led him to address topical subjects with strong political associations. Le roses sont belles (Roses are Beautiful, 1951-52) is, in fact, inspired by the Rosenberg trial, which stirred up the Italian and international intellectual classes. Accused of spying for the Russians, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were imprisoned before undergoing the death penalty in June 1953. The device used for their execution, namely the electric chair, was a frequent feature in Matta’s subsequent works. Moreover, they were increasingly dominated by atomic imagery not lacking in affinities with the nuclear trend. During his time in Rome he also produced his most well-known works: with titles mostly playing on assonance or contradiction and populated by monstrous creatures, symbolising hidden instincts in constant conflict. The canvas in the Cerruti Collection, executed in 1952, also belongs to this group of works. The helpless primordial figure lies flat on the ground, his limbs spread in a sign of surrender and his jaws agape in a grimace of pain, suggesting imminent death. Le plus libre (The Freest) becomes defeat without obligations or ties. The apocalyptic tone of the scene is accentuated by the fluid application of the changing colours, as if we are viewing it through a sheet of water. Matta himself explained the meaning of parallel galaxies in which “the rules of ‘the game’ are those of a morphology that shows man in the world and the world in man”.¹ When he exhibited fifteen recent works at the Sala Napoleonica in Venice in 1953, in fact, he told Alain Jouffroy: 

“I want to show the contradictions in matter, to show that the world is made of movements generated by every being that seeks to possess what he is not, to identify with his opposite […]. I want to show reality and what contradicts it in us, the inner life and its conflicts with the outside world, what separates the deep self from the manifest ME, this hurricane of doubts that we have in our heads and this material evidence with which they are ceaselessly confronted.”² 

As far as we know, this work had previously only belonged to the Cordier & Ekstrom Gallery in New York, where Matta had held a solo exhibition in 1963. Daniel Cordier, the French resistance hero-turned-gallerist and Paris partner of Arne Ekstrom, had followed the artist’s trajectory since 1956, when his works were exhibited with those by Jean Dubuffet and Jean Dewasne. From then on Matta had over a dozen solo and group exhibitions in the Cordier venues in Europe and the United States. Hence, it is likely that it was via Cordier that Le plus libre was sent to New York. Having remained in New York for many years, Le plus libre arrived in Italy at the end of 1970, perhaps directly at the Galleria Gissi in Turin, which Cerruti must have considered a reputable place for his purchases. 

Chiara Perin 

¹ R. S. Matta, in Venice 1953, p. 4. 

² Ibid., pp. 4-6.