My general aim will be to highlight the crucial role of Matta, who, after 1945, endeavored to reassess North-South relations from both a decolonial and post-colonial perspective. His involvement with Cuban communities, his support for Castro, his protest against The Rosenberg Trial, and his engagement alongside Henri Alleg during the Algerian War significantly redefined the geopolitical dynamics of art. His friendship with the author of ‘Proposition for a Black Power Manifesto,’ Ted Joans, and his closeness with Edouard Glissant demonstrate a determined effort to situate surrealism within a decolonial geopolitical perspective. His support for the Watts riots in the United States and his opposition to the Vietnam War also served as means to create immense works designed to immerse the observer. Finally, Matta’s unwavering support for Salvador Allende until Pinochet’s coup, the assassination of Pablo Neruda, and his friendship with Octavio Paz drove him to work tirelessly for a reassessment of the power relations between the United States and Latin America. It should be noted that as early as 1954, Matta experimented with using soil as a material to firstly create sculptures and later paintings, where the earthy surfaces express the identity of a land, a territory. It is this practice that will be examined in the lecture to examine one aspect of the artist’s political engagement.
Fabrice Flahutez is professor at the Université Jean Monnet in Saint-Etienne, co-director of the ECLLA research lab and Member of the Academic Institute of France. His research focuses on the avant-garde with particular emphasis on Surrealism and artist collectives after 1945. He has published many books on a variety of subjects and has curated international exhibitions. He was a member of the advisory committee for Surrealism Beyond Borders at the MET in New York and the Tate Modern in London. He was co-editor for Networking Surrealism in the United States: Artists, Agents, and the Market, vol. I, and Le surréalisme et l’argent, vol. 2 (Paris: German Center for Art History, 2019 and 2021). He is also the author of the catalogue Matta: Morphology of Desire for the exhibition in the Kunstforum Wien (February-June 2024). He will be co-organizer of ISSS Paris 2024, the annual congress of Surrealist studies.
Organised by Professor Gavin Parkinson (Professor in European Modernism, The Courtauld) as part of the 2024-25 Frank Davis Memorial Lecture Series, ‘A Century of Surrealism: Resistance and the Image Since the Manifesto of Surrealism’.
