Matta-Duchamp

things became common parlance, he translated the notion
of the mulitverse - he would surely have loved to
have conversed with Stephen Hawking - into his own
form of picture making with spectacular effect.
Like many of the Surrealists, he was interested in socalled
primitive art, or what the French now officially
call L’art premier. There is also a strong touch in his art
of Olmec and Toltec art, and MesoAmerican influences
in general, which was to inform his sense of texture
and palette. Today, looking at his early paintings, the
relation to Hieronymous Bosch also seems very evident
– while The Earth is a Man is perhaps a textual allusion
to The Garden of Earthly Delights (1503–1515)
both artists aside from the obvious excesses, display a
fascination with primary forms splitting and hatching
all manner of beings.
One of the artists he most clearly admired was Leonardo,
in particularly those visionary and diagrammatic
drawings he did of physical forces, as well as his mirrored
“secret” writing. Matta’s understanding of painting
as inherently alchemical as well as scientific is in
some ways akin to Kandinsky’s. We also can sense affinities
with the more abstracted floating architectural
cityscapes of Sant’Elia. Then there’s the post-human
scenography of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927). Matta’s
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