“One of our youngest friends, Matta Echauren, is now at the helm of a dazzling pictorial production. With him […] there is nothing ordered, and nothing which is not the result of a desire to deepen the faculty of divination through colour, a faculty in which he is exceptionally talented. Every one of the paintings Matta has executed during the last year is a celebration where all the odds come together, a pearl which snowballs, incorporating everything which glimmers, both physical and mental.” André Breton, Minotaure, no. 12-13, 1939
It was in 1938 that Matta invented the concept of “psychological morphology”. The young artist had been living in Paris for four years, at one point working in Le Corbusier’s studio. It was during his participation in the creation of the Pavilion of the Spanish Republic for the Universal Exhibition of 1937 that he met Picasso and Esteban Francès. It was through the intermediary of the latter that Matta was introduced to Salvador Dalí and then André Breton, who integrated him into the Surrealist group.
At the same time, Matta was also becoming friends with the British painter Gordon Onslow-Ford, who would become one of his most fervent admirers. It was whilst staying with Onslow-Ford in Switzerland during the summer of 1938 that Matta – who had limited himself artistically to drawing up until this point – first experimented with oil painting, as Onslow-Ford recalled: “*…+ he put little spots of yellow, red, green and blue on the edge of a palette knife. Then, without hesitation, he made a rapid gesture on the blank canvas and, since he did not want to use clean brushes, he worked the paint using his fingers, one for the yellow, another for the red, etc. And so he spread out the paint, mixing the colours on the canvas. This technique remained the basis for his oil paintings for several years, even if he eventually replaced his fingers with paintbrushes. This first action of Matta’s with oil paint has had repercussions that lasted until the New York years in the 1940s.” (G. Onslow-Ford, ‘Notes sur Matta et la peinture (1937-1941)’, Matta (exhibition catalogue), Paris, Musée national d’art moderne, 1985).
Morphologie psychologique de l’attente is thus one of the very first oils painted by Matta, only a few months after his discovery of the medium. A self-taught artist without any formal training, he possessed such an intuition for colour and texture and such a strong sense of structure that his contemporaries were transfixed. From the time of his very first paintings of 1938, he creates a universe of line, form and colour which sublimates the surroundings; applying the colour directly to the canvas without reflection or any preliminary sketching in accordance with the principles of Surrealist automatism.
The notion of ‘psychological morphology’, of which the present work is one of the most remarkable illustrations, lies at the heart of Matta’s art. The artist first employs this term in autumn 1938 whilst at Les Deux Magots in the company of André Breton who asked him to put his theory into writing. Which is what Matta did not long afterwards in his text ‘Morphologie psychologique’ (1938), in which he notably affirms that “in the domain of the conscience, a psychological morphology would be a graph of ideas” which should be conceived of “before optical images provide form for ideas, if one wants to remain at the centre of the transformation” (cited in G. Ferrari, Matta. Entretiens morphologiques – Notebook No. 1, 1936-1944, London, 1987). In other words, according to Matta, the eye only perceives a fraction of the reality. Through his art, Matta does not seek only to represent what is visible. On the contrary, he aspired to depict the interior landscape, to “invent visual equivalents for the diverse states of consciousness”, which is to say to extend the field of the conscience beyond sensorial perception. What interests him is not what this is, but rather the state of transformation, of perpetual change, the moment when an object passes from its primordial appearance to its definitive form. In a single image, he seeks to capture the conception, birth, life and death of a being, to make visible both the microcosm and the macrocosm. In doing so, Matta can be considered one of the very first artists to venture beyond the realm of dreams. As Gordon Onslow-Ford concludes (op. cit.), “we have taken it upon ourselves to find the means of seeing through a mountain, extending ourselves out to the horizon, forcing ourselves into the ground, touching the sky, seeing someone in their entirety - from birth to death - within a single unique form, discovering the invisible relationships between one thing and another, giving form to the cause and effect of a phenomenon, and crossing surfaces in order to penetrate the diaphanous world of love”. Between the autumn of 1938 and the end of 1939, Matta painted eight of these Morphologies, each one aspiring to reveal what is to be found beyond dreams, that which the human eye is incapable of seeing.
This quest was nourished by numerous influences, both scientific and artistic. Matta was notably fascinated by the recent evolutions in science and mathematics, and in particular Albert Einstein’s revolutionary concept of space and time and the writings of Peter D. Ouspensky (author of Tertium Organum) which proved the limits of visual perception and the deficiencies of tri-dimensional geometry. He was also very interested in the development of psychoanalysis, certain concepts of which inspired his iconography.
From a stylistic point of view, Matta’s first paintings are certainly influenced by his friendships with other artists in the Surrealist group, particularly Dalí, Duchamp and, above all, Tanguy whose work he admired greatly. In Morphologie psychologique de l’attente, Matta’s organic forms, colour range, and even the presence of swirling clouds and black suns owe much to the artistic innovations of the older artist. Matta already goes further than his mentor, inscribing his work into an unprecedented cosmic concept. Here, the different layers of paint conjure an atmospheric perspective and spatial realms which are interspersed with divergent trailing lines and enigmatic obstacles, suggesting both the immensity of the cosmos and the obscure recesses of the psyche. Forms emerge from the canvas before seemingly dissolving between the darkness and light; a metaphor for the multiplicity inherent in space and time which so fascinated Matta. From his very first paintings, Matta creates a system of representation that is completely new and entirely personal, seeming to dive into the depths of the unconscious like no one else before.
Morphologie psychologique de l’attente is a visionary work which presages the innovations that will lead Matta to become the champion of automatic gestural painting a few years later, influencing a new generation of artists including Robert Motherwell, Jackson Pollock and Arshile Gorky. Poetic and prophetic, it is undoubtedly one of the ‘pioneering paintings’ that Gordon Onslow-Ford, the first owner of this very work, so admired (op. cit.): “Matta’s paintings […] are the direct expressions of the mind onto canvas. They are works of pure genius, into which no personal desire enters, nor one critical thought. Those who discover the world through his paintings […] will see their lives enriched, like mine has been, by a permanent joy. Modern art, in the sense that it is a manifestation of a consciousness that is deeper than the sky, the earth and man, is still only just at its beginning and is moving towards a new way of LIVING SEEING. Matta’s pioneering paintings have opened the gateway”.