I think of him as the father of Gordon Matta-Clark, which is a little rude of me. One of Chile’s best-known painters, and important in American and European art, Roberto Matta was the same age I was—twenty-eight—when he moved to New York City. But he arrived from Paris, in exile from the Second World War, and I arrived from Vermont, and I was only running away from a farmhouse. When Matta arrived, he already knew the Surrealists—André Breton, René Magritte, Salvador Dalí—and quickly befriended the Abstract Expressionists—Jackson Pollock, Arshile Gorky, Mark Rothko and Robert Motherwell. Matta served as a bridge between the two movements, never wholly belonging to either. Matta wrote, in 1965, on the function of the artist in society, that an artist is “like the child in Andersen’s tale who is the only one to say the king is naked.” He painted imaginary landscapes he called “inscapes,” but his work also reflected disturbing world events. He said: “Just as we need to refer to maps to locate ourselves in space, we have to find a way of depicting our position in history.” In Santiago in 1971, Matta painted a mural—The First Goal of the Chilean People, to celebrate the victory of Salvatore Allende. Painted on a public swimming pool wall in the working-class neighborhood of La Granja, it shows cartoon-like nude figures. The mural was covered over in sixteen coats of paint when Augusto Pinochet took power in 1973. Matta’s mural disappeared along with the thousands of people who Pinochet disappeared. The mural has since been uncovered and restored, the act of erasure reversed.
-Morgan English