Word: matta
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Critic Eleanor Jewett. "The influence of Marca-Relli, Baziotes, De Kooning, Matta and Picasso ... is so obvious that it hurts." Pointing to this year's out-of-town jury (Manhattan's Painter Hedda Sterne and Sculptor Ibram Lassaw, Carnegie Institute's Fine Arts Director Gordon Bailey Washburn), Critic Jewett snorted, "Originality has been sacrificed in the jury's sustained effort to make this Midwest exhibition as like as possible to a New York modern show...
Lesser awards went to Italy's Renato Birolli, 49, for his dramatic composition of lightning in a vineyard; to Chilean-born Painter Matta, 43, for a 10-ft.-long canvas filled with bedazzling pyrotechnics that looked like a combined château and gasworks in hell the night the fireworks factory blew up; to Rome's Toti Scialoja, 41, for a low-keyed study in a lyrical cubist style. Not until the honorable mentions did the first U.S. painters appear: little-known Pittsburgh Artist Marjorie Eklind, 31, and this year's leading U.S. Prizewinner John Hultberg...
...Matta best explains himself with paint on canvas, and it is obvious that what he has to say in his new show is richer and happier than previously. His ceiling-high canvas opposite displays a peacock softness and brilliance of color and a range of textures from cactus to satin. It creates the illusion of deep space, and hums with delicate, darting figures...
...elaborate craftsman, Matta deplores what he calls "the tubist painters-those who squirt paint senselessly onto canvas and those who are interested only in the verb 'to see.'" His own paintings, he insists, are not mere designs, but explorations of the verb "to be," i.e., they have to do with human existence. "I represent man," he says, "not as in a mirror, but as a force constantly changing. Man is 50% irrational. One half has been measured by mathematics; the other can be reached only through poetry...
Most abstractionists either shuffle geometrical figures or splash about hoping for happy accidents. Matta does neither. In a sense he is enlarging the bounds of abstract art by painting representationally. He pays as much attention to the representation of space and atmosphere, of light, shadow and shape, as the most uncompromising realist. So that while his pictures suggest no familiar, recognizable forms, they do produce a strange illusion of reality...