Inscape

Having launched his artistic career with the Surrealists in Paris in the late 1930s, Matta traveled in 1941 from his wartime home of New York to Mexico, where he studied volcanic landscapes and absorbed the burning sunlight and bright colors. He charged his subsequent “inscapes” – imaginary landscapes immersed in mysterious light and brilliant color – with flashes of flaming yellows and oranges. Many of these paintings evoke turbulent explosions. They are, in fact, projections of the artist’s inner state – a landscape discovered within the self, constituting what he called a “psychological morphology.” In this work, a number of planes float through space along different vectors, creating a dynamic play of forms ruled, in the artist’s view, by “magnetic fields.” Matta’s preoccupation with planes – flat geometric surfaces – reflects the fact that before becoming a painter, he had studied architecture and worked in Le Corbusier’s atelier in Paris. He was also fascinated by certain science fiction illustrations and films. Matta believed that artists must interpret the spiritual impact of technological discoveries in subjective, human terms. In 1943, he declared that Einstein was as important as Freud for the modern artist. The former architect wrote, “Painting has one foot in architecture and one foot in the dream” (quoted in Peter Selz, “Matta,” in Roberto Matta: Paintings and Drawings, 1971–1979 [La Jolla, Calif., 1980], p. 8).