Artist, citizen of the world, visionary, multifaceted author, painter and designer, architect and sculptor, militant artist, Roberto Sebastián Antonio Matta Echaurren (Santiago de Chile, 1911 – Civitavecchia, 2002) He is certainly one of the most important artists of the twentieth century and, at the same time, one of the least celebrated and represented figures in the collections of Italian museums.
The exhibition recalls and renews the artist's historical bond with Venice
Matta arrived in the lagoon city for the first time in 1948, among the artists of the collection Peggy Guggenheim hosted in the epochal exhibition at the Greek Pavilion. Again in Venice in 1953, on the occasion of the exhibition Matta 1949-1953 at the Correr Museum organized by the Galleria del Cavallino and under the aegis of Charles Cardazzo, a work by Matta enters an Italian public collection for the first time: exhibited in the exhibition in the Sala Napoleonica, Alba sulla terra is purchased by the Municipality of Venice for Ca' Pesaro. Protagonist of Surrealism whose centenary is celebrated this year, Matta has developed his own language: irrationality, unconscious, psychic automatism and deformed matter, heritage of the surreal that combine with the fundamental experience in Paris as a collaborator of Le Corbusier. The geometric, architectural and constructive component that distinguish his mature production, retain the echo of his love for poetry and his youthful closeness to Breton and his companions.
The exhibition opens with a monumental work, over 10 metres long, from the 1972s: Coïgitum from XNUMX.
The artist immediately presented himself as a participant in the world of science fiction and as the precursor of an aesthetic, which he loved to define as “from Leonardo da Vinci to NASA”, where the sidereal atmospheres of video games and those of Street art are mixed. Alongside, contemporary design objects, such as the Malitte seating system: a modular composition of five blocks, today produced by Paradisoterrestre and available to the public at the exhibition. And then objects and sculptures in glass, children of the extraordinary Venetian experience of the Fucina degli Angeli. Among the most significant works exhibited at Ca' Pesaro are the intense “La Question” from 1958, which recalls the issue of the Algerian War, the monumental “La Chasse aux adolescents”, a large canvas that evokes the French revolution of May 1968, dramatically topical today and the intense “El Burundu Burunda ha muerto” from 1975 which addresses the theme of the Colombian civil war of the XNUMXs.
Cover image: Roberto Sebastián Matta: Les Juges partent en guerre, 1967, oil on canvas, 200 × 300 cm. Alisée Matta Collection© Roberto Matta, by SIAE 2024
