THE VERTIGO OF EROS
ROBERTO MATTA, 1944
Look at it. It almost looks like a galaxy. Gravity changing its mind. Lights with no source. Shapes trying to become bodies, then changing their mind halfway through. The floor? Forget it. There's no floor. Matta painted this in 1944 and called it The Vertigo of Eros. He was Chilean. Trains as an architect. Worked for Le Corbusier in Paris. Fell in with the Surrealists. Then, when the war came, he got out and landed in New York. Later, he said the Surrealists arrived in America "like a Charlie Chaplin movie." Utterly lost. And yeah, look at this painting. Lost, but not dead. Floating, but not calm. Everything is blooming, collapsing, reaching, flirting with becoming something, then melting before it can introduce itself. Matta had a name for spaces like this: inscapes. Inside-landscapes. Not the world in front of you. The stuff inside your head. So this is not really outer space. It is inner space. What space feels like when your brain is a room with no floor and all the furniture is floating. And the title is doing a lot. Eros. Sure. Love, desire, bodies, attraction. Sounds romantic. But the real word is vertigo. Desire as freefall. That dizzy second when something starts and your body knows before your brain does. Pollock knew Matta. So did the other New York painters. They talked about automatism, about letting the hand move before the brain could boss it around. A lot of what becomes American painting over the next decade passes through this guy from Santiago. Most of the painting is falling. And if you've ever stood somewhere and suddenly had no idea which way was down, you don't need this one explained.