text= Roberto Sebastian Echaurren Matta was born in 1911 in Santiago, Chile. After earning a degree in architecture, he travelled to Paris where for two years he worked in Le Corbusier šs studio. Influenced by his association with the Surrealists, Matta began to develop his own visual language and, with his early works, the Inscape series and the Psychological Morphologies, which explored themes of cosmic creation and destruction. The outbreak of war in 1939 drove Matta into exile in New York. Alongside Max Ernst, he began working with Art of the Century, Peggy Guggenheimšs influential gallery, where he exerted a strong influence on the emerging Abstract Expressionist painters. 

During the 1940s, Mattašs work featured machine-like and invertebrate shapes interacting in a dynamically charged cosmic space.  These portrayed spaces do not limit themselves to a real space, but spaces that transform themselves in the void of time.  Paintings swirl around imaginary spaces in which a strong link to aboriginal art is present.

Matta lived his whole life away from his native Chile.  Living abroad, memory was the only tool to create. Each painting is driven by a nostalgic force, in which imaginary spaces are composed and implied.  No horizon linesŠinstead the viewer is immersed in a vortex of forces, imaginations and nuances that evoke the need to wake up from a dream.  Matta has one foot in Architecture, and another foot on the dream. 

The act of remembering, and collaging the ashes of those memories into highly complex compositions is what is present in every single painting.  Memory may be seen as the uncovering of layers and layers of information or images; but this process is contradicted by Mattašs complex addition and juxtapositions of icons and spaces that link his virtual identity into the poetry o f color and oil paint.