Devoir dans le hasard [Duty in Chance]

Roberto Matta’s enigmatic work incorporates bright colors, deep spatial planes, and biomorphic forms to create what he called “inscapes” or “psychological morphologies”—visual representations of the mind’s internal workings. Reflecting this concept’s roots in Freud and science, his compositions are complex and layered, often having multiple vantage points and several protagonists.

Increasingly in the 1940s, his congested and chaotic scenes suggested Matta’s response to the changing political landscape. Images of electrical machinery, looming structures, and distressed figures reflect Matta’s social and political concerns, and would remain as core features of his work. Matta was a key practitioner of automatism among the Surrealists and introduced these spontaneous techniques to American painters, including Jackson Pollock and Arshile Gorky.