ABSTRACT
Matta, the Chilean-born Surrealist painter long resident in Paris, is currently showing six new mural-size canvases at the Alexander Iolas Gallery. As a Surrealist, of course, Matta has been involved from the beginning of his career—in the late 1930's—in an artistic attitude that deliberately set out to accommodate a wide range of extra-artistic concerns. Whether art—and especially the art of painting—permits such an easy separation of ends and means is doubtful, to say the least, and no less so in Surrealist painting than in any other mode. Matta's style exercises so complete an authority over whatever details he undertakes to include in his pictures that the results remain firmly in the realm of the artist's characteristic vision. What we see in Matta is another example of the victory of style over ideology—the trick that history has played on many of the most radical movements in modern art.
