Generating new epistemological coordinates: Roberto Matta’s open cubes as meta-images

This contribution explores the functioning of Matta’s works, in particular his open cubes and the paintings preceding them, as meta-images that question the very dimensions along which space is conceptualized in painting (and by extension life) through offering alternative spatialities and encouraging different kinds of perception and experience. For this, the transition from Modernism to Postmodernism, Matta’s affiliation with the Surrealists and most importantly with Duchamp as well as the works leading to the open cubes will also be considered. Following a contextual and iconographic background of Matta’s early works, the various forms taken up by the open cubes from the 1940s to the 1990s are discussed in order to show how they attempted to dismantle some of the traditional conventions behind the production and reception of the realities depicted in artworks – above all through the distortion of geometrical perspective – which also corresponded to the Surrealist ideal of apprehending and transmitting a sur- or superior reality transcending the confines of the everyday. Formal and iconographic analyses of the images that Matta repeatedly took up are subsequently used to delineate the transformation and connotations of the open cube in Matta’s art over the decades. I will also explore the way in which the visual motif of the open cube functions as a meta-image with epistemological ambitions, by offering new modes of seeing and thus initiating a dialogue with the very limits of the human situation through Matta’s attempt to stretch the constraints of perception and representation. The concluding section suggests reasons for the gradual dismembering and disappearance of this particular motif in Matta’s work in the light of changing trends in art and art criticism, which have only recently started to highlight the increasing, contemporary relevance of the open cubes.