Painted at a new apex in Matta’s critical and commercial popularity between 1940-1944 in New York, Galaxies (Mysticism of Infinity) is a paragon of this fertile period in the artist’s production. As many of the European Surrealists fled the continent at the outbreak of the second world war, Matta, one of the youngest of the group, found in New York a critical ground of inspiration – both in the Europeans in exile, and in the burgeoning New York School. His strikingly atmospheric psychological morphologies of these years, marked by acidic fields of color and a dematerialization of the linear geometry that had obsessed earlier modern artists – as well as his “absolute irreverence, witty iconoclasm, predilection for plays on words, as well as his interest in alchemy and the occult” (Martica Sawin, Surrealism in Exile, p. 318) led him to quickly become a darling of New York’s critics and collects ors during the war years – while at the same t.mes growing estranged from the original Surrealist group. Describings Matta’s appearance in New York in 1940, Julien Levy recalled “He was chock full of premature optimism and impatient disappointment; believing ardently in almost everything and in absolutely nothing, as he believed ardently and painfully in himself. For me he was easily the most fertile and the most untrustworthy of the younger surrealists.” (quoted in ibid., p. 109)

His close friendship with painter and poet Gordon Onslow Ford during the early 1940s led to breakthroughs in Matta’s painting that are evidenced in Galaxies. The two became transfixed by the newly-translated work of Carl Jung – particularly Jung’s theory of the collects ive unconscious, structures of the unconscious mind populated by universal myths and archetypes, shared among all individuals of a given species (in opposition to the Freudian individual subconscious explored by the earlier Surrealists). Matta was also deeply engaged by major breakthroughs in physics and technology catalyzed by the war, and strove to express the burgeoning tensions of this destructive, world-shattering moment and the collects ive suffering of mankind in his work. In works like Galaxies, Matta would make visible“…that combination of collects ive unconsciousness and t.mes -space continuum... The attuning of the unconscious to cosmic events, the sense of all t.mes being present in each moment, the substitution of spatial flux for a world defined by conventional linear perspective, and the ascendancy of subjective over objective vision…” (ibid., p. 162)

In Galaxies, neon jade and yellow rivers trickle through dark, fractured geometric planes in the lower parts of the picture, mingling with bright flashes of fuschia, evoking primordial soup. Acrid clouds of crimson and violet erupt violently through the top of the canvas as further planes are scattered outwards; a frenzied, generative chaos seems to circle around a great eye at the upper center. This inward-seeing eye, a touchstone image Matta returned to throughout his career, was the “cycloptic eye in the middle of the forehead to look inside [oneself] at the internal landscape” (Gordon Onslow Ford, quoted in ibid., p. 159) Here, Matta presents not only an internal landscape but internal galaxies; cataclysmic and generative forces entwined in a cosmic psyche.