[Matta’s] paintings are not the transcription of seen or dreamed realities, but the recreations of anemic and spiritual states. The invisible becomes visible, or more precisely, incarnated.
Painted at a new apex in Matta’s critical and commercial popularity between 1940-1944 in New York, Membranes de l'espace (Agua safiro) 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.
The central figure of that moment, the intersection, the connection and inspiration, was Matta. Through him, Surrealist painting penetrated an unexplored region and, simultaneously, fertilized the art of the young North Americans. To ignore or minimize his influence, as has on occasion been attempted, is, in addition to being nonsense, scandalous.
Transfixed by the newly-translated work of Carl Jung – particularly his theory of the collects ive Unconscious, a set of universal archetypes Jung believed were embedded deeply in the unconscious mind of all people - Matta sought to map these foundational myths as atmospheric topographies of the mind in his psychological morphologies. He 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 Membranes de l'espace, 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)
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.
In Membranes de l'espace, cement-toned rivers trickle through ashen, fractured planes that are interrupted by stark flashes of brilliant white; these milky galaxies converge and elide in a rich primordial soup. Exactingly incised geometric lines in the surface come into focus after a few moments of studying; like ancient pictograms in a long-lost language, they swirl in a frenzy around a gleaming emerald orb in the lower left. 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.