ROBERTO MATTA&

THE FOURTH WAYVenue: TBD

Date: TBD

The Chilean born artist and maestro of surrealism Robert Matta has an almost space age vision of the future which was married to a hand that accomplished technical skills beyond the human imagination, he takes us on a journey laced with lookalike pixels almost foreseeing the age of computer graphics in its com-plexity and visionary allure, its almost inconceivable that all this was accomplished without the aid of computer aided design (CAD) software, his is an art that could lead a new generation of technology in its nano sense of dynamics and condensed convolutions.

That Roberto Matta paid homage to his South American inheritance is known and well documented from as early as 1932, less explored is his deep immersion and affiliation to Pre-Colombian Andean textile art as he discovered them and his Chilean Andean Pre-Colombian heritage long before he left for Europe, the collections of Andean textiles from the Atacama and Arica Valle de Azapa cultures in particular made a deep and lasting impression on him as a young man. He was following an individual path and yet a general trend that witnessed a flight from a Eurocentric worldview in the search for an “other,” Native American First Nations spirituality, which was not the sole domain of North American artists that had only started around 1940. Mike Kelley observed that “Taos, New Mexico, became an artists’ Mecca [in the 1920s],” a time when Breton, Eluard, or Donati bought Hopi Kachina dolls and Pre-Columbian totemic objects as well as Andean textiles.

Roberto Matta, The Power of Disorder, 1964-65, oil on canvas, 298 x 993 cm, Musée National d’Art Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, France

Roberto Matta, Sans titre, 1942, pencil and crayon on paper, 57 x 72 cmFelix the cats (detail), Chancay circa 1200AD, 220x72 cm (aprox.)

In the early 1940s, Max Ernst and Jackson Pollock, influenced by the exhibition Indian Art of the United States at the Museum of Modern Art, made sand paintings, executed flat on the ground in the manner of the Navajo. Torres Garcia from nearby Uruguay was also exploring such Andean Pre-Colombian tex-tile arts as far back as 1922 in New York City and via the 1928 exhibition at the Musee de Trocadero show on Andean Native arts that his son partly curated. That both Matta and Torres Garcia shared such a passion for Andean Pre-Colombian art and both followed esoteric traditions such the schools of the Four Way as brought to the West by Gurdjieff and his brilliant student Ouspensky, add another rich dimension to this as yet untold story and how its interwoven with Russia’s major contributions to Western spiritual awakenings in the early 20th century.

That Matta was already an accomplished seeker of the truth and a true believer in the arts of his native Andean cultures mainly from the Arica, Atacama re-gion of Northern Chile, give him insights long before he met Breton and the Paris Surrealist group, his seminal role in nourishing that group with his already acquired understand of the principals of spiritual developments as a native American have been only misunderstood as a direct result of poor Eurocentric, Western museumology and curatorial practice coupled with an ignorance based on an over indulgence in the recording of art history married to a deeply seated attitude of “Western” supremacy which gave rise to an Art-Colonialism that still persists to this very day in most museum and academic circles, this exhibition aims to elevate the pull of such chains that shackle us to an outdated and now redundant recording of art history.

MantlePainted cottonChancay style, Central CoastCa. 1000 – 1460 AD 227 x 10 cm

Roberto MattaXpace the Ego, 1945, oil on canvas, 202.2 x 457.2 cm, Musée National d’Art Moderne, Centre Georges

Andean Pre-Columbian Textiles are one of the seminal yet little known influences to a Pan-American prototype of abstraction in the pre and post-war era, innovative art schools such as the Bauhaus, Black Mountain College and museums collections at the Natural History and the Museum of Primitive Art in NYC where also instrumental, dealers such as Betty Parsons and Andre Emmerich also played a pivotal role in these cross fertilisations of visual arts culture. That Matta played such an early and clearly defined role is assimilating such Andean aesthetics into his spiritual being as nourishment to go ever deeper into the mystery of his existence is a journey that we are invited to explore at his invitation via his votive explorations of the soul itself, his works range from the darkest aspects of our shared humanity to his very own personal epiphany and awakenings, in this sense he is a true visual bard or an artist as a Shaman.

The extent to which African and Oceanic tribal art have nourished and influenced the Cubist, Surrealist and later schools of modern art is well known and documented. Less known or published is the impact and connections of Andean Pre-Columbian art in the context of modern artistic developments apart from ancient Mexican architectural and sculptural in influences on works of, Frank Lloyd Wright, Diego Rivera and Henry Moore.

Roberto Matta, Convict the Impossible, 1947, 66 x 55.3 cm Chancay Chimu Mask (detail), ciaca 1300 AD, 60x35 cm

Huari Man’s Shirt with Four Large Winged Puma Deities (detail), Middle Horizon: 800 - 900 AD, 167.6 x 108 cm

Roberto Matta, Le Propheteur (detail), 1954 oil on canvas 199 x 295 cm

This unique exhibition will present visual comparative narratives illustrating the role that Andean Pre-Columbian Textiles in the development of Matta’s oeuvre have played a significant and major part in opening the windows to new developments of both lyrical and geometric Abstraction in the 20th century.

Challenging the notion that abstraction is a unique development of the modern West, the journey reveals its connections and deep roots in Andean Pre-Columbian Textiles arts, it further illustrates the threads that link an aesthetic kinship in the work of twentieth-century artists such as Joaquín Torres García, Josef and Anni Albers, Mark Rothko, Barnett Newman, Adolph Gottlieb, and other important artists related to the Abstract Expressionists, Colour Field movement and later stylistic developments such as Minimalism. Matta not only shares a stage with these legends of 20th artist, he obviously was more than instrumental in creating the platform for the stars to sprinkle their prisms on the constellations that give our century its truly unique splendour, thus enriching our own welding and inspiring our own spiritual developments, as needed maybe even more today in a world apparently spin-ning out of orbit as technology takes us into realms never ever witnessed before, Matta’s work can offer us a Mandela to our own inner chaos and then freedom, “Only the Truth may set us Free” (J Christ).

The Paul Hughes Andean textile collection comprises over 35 works collected over the last 40 years and has been exhibited and published widely, he has also been instrumental in assisting and curating some of the world’s most important collections both private and institutional. His focus in collecting is the relationships to be found in the ancient and the modern: “all art was once contemporary.”

Chavinoid Paracas (detail), 500 – 200 BC, 129.38 x 202.5 cm

Roberto Matta, Gorky’s Left (detail), circa 1940, pencil on paper, 35 x 28 cm