Deux personnages debout

Author: Marijke Peyser

In early 1961 Roberto Matta spent three months in Chile, his native country. During that time he was interviewed by the local press on countless occasions. Asked ‘How do you paint?’, Matta replied that he started by making marks on the canvas and then went in search of something unfamiliar, something that he had never been seen before, something new. His method calls to mind the lesson Leonardo da Vinci taught his pupils: ‘I don’t draw horses, I see them in the marks that I make.’^[1] In the conversations, the question as to whether there was a permanent theme in his work also came up. Matta’s answer was unambiguous: ‘Man, always man. Man is always the same. What varies is the emotion he experiences, the place where he lives.’^[2]

Man also plays the main role in the painting Deux personnages debout. Two forms stand opposite one another; a male and a female figure. They are shown at peace in a non-threatening situation, which is an exception in Matta’s oeuvre: his paintings usually depict apocalyptic scenes, like L’idée noir (1942) or Le goût d’apocalyps (1957-58). Deux personnages debout was painted in a technique unusual for Matta. Instead of painting very thinly in oils, the artist mixed the paint with sand. The paint was partially absorbed by the sand, muting the colours – blue, brown, white and beige. In some places the canvas is still visible.

Matta, who trained as an architect, did not begin to paint until he was twenty-seven, in the summer of 1938, at the insistence of his friend Gordon Onslow Ford.^[3] The technique he used then and spoke about in the interviews was automatism, the ‘key’ to his oeuvre and one of the fundamental principles of Surrealism championed by André Breton.^[4] Matta met Breton in the autumn of 1937 in his Galerie Gradiva in Paris. Breton immediately bought two of Matta’s drawings that he saw there: ‘Breton and others there looked at my drawings and said: you are a Surrealist. I had absolutely no idea what that meant,’ said the artist.^[5] In Breton’s book Le surréalisme et la peinture (1965 edition) he devoted more attention to Matta and his work than to any other Surrealist. In ‘Des tendances les plus récentes de la peinture surréaliste’ (1939) Breton wrote: ‘Last year every painting by Matta was a feast in which chance was all.’^[6] According to Breton, Matta gave his protagonists a way out of distressing situations: the composition offers a new perspective, a geometric place which – literally – enabled them to escape the conflict which they have to deal with on the canvas.^[7]