The Vertigo of Eros

Roberto Matta, 1944 · Gallery 522 · Floor 5

Alright, so look at the thin lines first. Kinda like perspective lines going nowhere. Somebody drew those with a ruler in his head. Chilean guy. Roberto Matta. Trained as an architect in Santiago. Goes to Paris. Draws for Le Corbusier. Ya know, one of the biggest names in modern architecture. Then the poet Lorca sends him to Dalí. Dalí sends him to André Breton. By ’37, he’s a Surrealist. One of the youngest in the group. Then the war. 1939, he gets to New York. He’s twenty-seven, about the same age as some of the young American painters. Motherwell. Pollock. By 1942, they’re meeting at his studio. He runs it like a class. Bring your drawings. Let the hand go. See what comes out. Motherwell said Matta wanted to show up the older Surrealists. The middle-aged, gray-haired guys, more or less. And the Americans take that let-the-hand-go part and run with it. Abstract Expressionism starts in rooms like that one. Anyway, back to the painting. He made it in 1944, and it’s big, right? Wider than a couch. Looks almost cosmic. Dark brown-black, with that yellow glow coming up from the bottom. It’s got these little white eggs floating through it. There’s that folded shape in the top left. Almost looks like pieces of a brain. Then there’s all this stuff scattered around them. Like a galaxy blew apart and the dust is still hanging there. Look at those thin lines again. White ones, yellow ones, traveling between all these things. Almost like somebody’s drawing the path of an orbit. Or trying to show you gravity. The invisible pull between things. You can see the architect’s trained hand is still in there. Drawing a space you can’t quite figure out. He called this kind of thing an inscape. A landscape inside his head. And somehow it feels miles deep. The title’s The Vertigo of Eros. Vertigo. Ya know, that feeling when you lose your balance. And Eros? That’s the Greek god of love and desire. OK, so there’s this guy Sigmund Freud. A doctor who thought a lot of what drives us is going on in our heads without us even knowing it. Freud borrows that name, Eros, to describe the pull toward life. Ya know, wanting to live. Love. Basically, just to keep going. And he thought there was an opposite pull, toward… death. So some people read this painting as those two forces pulling against each other. And you are somewhere in the middle, just trying to keep your balance. Now look for a floor in there. A horizon. Somewhere to put your feet. All those lines, but nowhere to stand.

▶ Listen on Listen to Frank

Also in Gallery 522