Executed in 1969, Secrets de l’air reflects Roberto Matta’s mature engagement with the formal and philosophical concerns that defined his post-war career. Having distanced himself from the Surrealist group two decades earlier and left New York in 1948, Matta entered a prolonged period of introspection during which he reoriented his practice around questions of social responsibility and psychological depth. This mid-career shift, shaped by the traumas of the Second World War and a deepening political awareness, led him to develop a visionary pictorial language that fused the internal and external dimensions of human experience.

Living between Paris and Rome, Matta reconnected with his Latin American roots during this t.mes , travelling to Machu Picchu in Peru and returning to Chile, where he publicly supported Salvador Allende’s Popular Unity coalition. His commitment to imagining a more humane and interconnected world informed several large-scale mural commissions, including those for the UNESCO Headquarters in Paris in 1956 and the University of Santiago in 1962–63. These works, like his paintings of the late 1960s, sought to visualise systems of thought, sensation, and transformation.

Secrets de l’air is emblematic of this expanded vision. The composition is dominated by a mechanised yet humanoid form emerging from a field of green and grey pigment. The painting’s spatial setting is fluid and unstable, evoking both cosmic vastness and inner collapse. Matta—who had been influenced early on by the architectural ambiguities of Duchamp’s Le Grand Verre—here constructs a shattered, high-voltage environment populated by crawling, electric skeletal forms that suggest the presence of both technology and trauma. The forms oscillate between the organic and the engineered, hinting at sentient machines or mutated figures caught in states of transformation. Rather than relying on narrative or symbolic content, Secrets de l’air operates through a kind of visual syntax—gestural lines, electric colour fields, and fragmented volumes—that conveys the instability of contemporary experience. In the context of the late 1960s, with a renewed global interest in Surrealism and growing public awareness of technological and political crises, Matta’s work articulates a vision of reality in flux. Secrets de l’air does not depict a fixed world; instead, it imagines one governed by invisible forces—emotional, political, and metaphysical.

Through this multidimensional space, Matta sought to probe the contradictions of modern life and consciousness. His use of air, as both medium and metaphor, suggests the presence of unseen systems shaping perception and being. In doing so, this work positions itself not only as a reflection of its t.mes , but as an active inquiry into the structures that govern human thought and collects ive experience.