The tension between liberating art from the vestiges of two-dimensionality while at the same time uncovering the psychological aspects of humankind’s physical environment was at play during much of Roberto Matta’s long career. Painted toward the end of his New York exile (1939–1948), Hermala II marks a transitional moment in the artist’s trajectory as he moved away from his figural representations of the earlier part of the 1940s and toward his sidereal landscapes of the 1950s (the El espacio de la especie/ Space of the Species series). Here, the figures—the dual insectoids along the lower portion and upper right of the canvas—are far less defined than in earlier works (which he often did on paper) but, the overall treatment and sparse background is similar. In this sense, Hermala II is masterful in the use of materials, particularly in the illusion of dense color achieved with a minimum amount of pigment. To create such work, Matta first stained the canvas and allowed the shapes that emerged from the dye to dictate the objects that he delineated with dry media and pigments. “I don’t paint,” he once said of his process. “I see a cosmos in the [stained canvas]. My point of departure is the stains.” The nonlinear process resulted in the depiction of an ambiguous and overwhelming space where the distance between foreground and background is blurred, which forces the viewer’s eye to fall at the center of colliding and multidirectional perspectives. Matta called this 360-degree viewpoint the “central knot of perception.”
Roberto Sebastián Antonio Matta Echaurren (was born in Santiago, Chile and studied architecture at the Pontificia Universidad Católica and drawing at the Academia de Bellas Artes. In 1933 he joined the Merchant Marines and arrived in Europe. Matta’s initial years in Paris were spent practicing architecture at the studio of Le Corbusier, making small drawings on the side. In 1934 he met Federico García Lorca through family members in Madrid and through him, he met Salvador Dalí. A fortuitous encounter with the English artist Gordon Onslow Ford encouraged Matta to give up architecture and become a painter. He formally joined the Surrealists in the fall of 1937 and participated in their group’s show at the Wildenstein Gallery that year and then again in the Exposition Internationale des Surrealism at the Galerie des Beaux-Arts in 1938. Matta’s initial painted series—including his hallmark Psychological Morphologies of the late 1930s and Inscapes of the early 1940s—are influenced by Freudian psychology and experimentation with the Surrealist notion of automatic writing and the principle of chance. In November 1939, upon the outbreak of World War II, Matta moved to New York with his American wife, Ann Matta-Clark. There he sought out the artists of the New York School—Jackson Pollock, William Baziotes, Robert Motherwell, and Peter Busa among them. In the summer of 1941, Matta traveled to Mexico with Motherwell and saw the large format works of the muralists, a scale that he assimilated into his own production. A significant shift occurred in 1944 when he transitioned from his early interior landscapes to figurative works that reflected a growing concern with humankind. Matta was expelled from the surrealists in 1947, the year before his definitive return to Europe, but was readmitted to the group in 1959. Following trips to Cuba in the 1960s, his work took on distinct political and spiritual intentions.
