ARTS

Blanton exhibit reveals work of a little-known modernist master

Francisco Matto? The name and the artwork may be new to many, but a ground-breaking exhibit brings his art to light.

By Jeanne Claire van Ryzin
AMERICAN-STATESMAN ARTS WRITER
Tuesday, July 07, 2009

What's the takeaway from "Francisco Matto: The Modern and the Mythic," the stunning new exhibit at the Blanton Museum of Art?

That such an intriguing body of art work has lingered mostly off the radar.

Francisco Matto is hardly a household name, even to many in the art world. While other artists of his milieu left Latin America for the art capitals of Europe and the United States, Matto stayed in his native Uruguay, living his entire life (1911-1995) in the same house in the capital city of Montevideo. Financially well-off and with a monklike dedication to his progressive modernist vision, Matto eschewed the globe-trotting habits of his peers and rarely pursued public exposure or even commercial attention.

His focus for more than five decades of intensive art making? Matto believed that visual abstraction could be a universal artistic language, one that could transcend cultures and centuries and be the expression of the deepest part of the human soul. He strove to create a spiritual and timeless art based on mythic symbols culled from the ancient art of the Americas. Contemporary art should and would connect to pre-Columbian art, Matto believed.

Matto developed his own personal artistic alphabet of shapes and forms (and sometimes words and numbers) that he used again and again in color-saturated paintings or wooden sculptures he termed "totems."

Now, the Blanton exhibit brings a comprehensive selection of Matto's masterful art — more than 70 paintings and sculpture — together for the first comprehensive exhibit ever staged in the United States. Wandering the exhibit is an alluring trip into one artist's very singular vision.

The current exhibit is a new version of one presented in 2007 at the Sixth Mercosul Biennial in Brazil that was organized by Gabriel Perez-Barreiro, the Blanton's former curator of Latin American art. The show's Blanton run is its only one , making it a rare opportunity to understand a rare 20th-century artist.

Matto was a student of El Taller Torres-Garc?a, the workshop established by master artist Joaqu?n Torres-Garc?a, whose advocacy of modernist aesthetics re-directed much of Latin American art in the 20th century away from the traditional representative styles and toward an aesthetic of abstraction.

Matto took his teachings to heart. But whereas his midcentury peers largely were not religious, Matto was a devout Catholic. He didn't marry until in his 40s and never had children. While most artists of Matto's generation believed their art was a direct expression of their politics — and though Matto lived through tumultuous decades of political upheaval in Latin America — Matto never revealed what his political beliefs were, or if he even had any. And whereas other artists strove to follow an artistic trajectory that clearly showed a progression, Matto's creative process was so inward and impermeable — so focused on a very limited set of forms and symbols — that it's virtually impossible to distinguish a chronology of his work based on style.

Hence, the current exhibit — unlike so many retrospective showings of a solo artist — isn't at all organized chronologically. Really, it wouldn't help in understanding Matto if it were.

Instead you can revel in Matto's almost compulsive use of the same forms and symbols. You'll see those forms — a pair of circles, a sun, a geometric "u" shape — migrate from Matto's paintings to his wooden wall constructions to his totem.

Matto derived his visual alphabet in large part from the ancient indigenous art of the Americas. In fact, he began collecting pre-Columbian art and artifacts as a young man and in his lifetime amassed a substantial collection. Photographs of the artist in his studio show Matto literally surrounding himself with pre-Columbian art as he worked. And to make that connection clear in the current exhibit, Blanton curators cleverly assembled a group of pre-Columbian art from a collection owned by the University of Texas's Department of Art and Art History.

"Francisco Matto: The Modern and the Mythic" builds on the success of two previous ground-breaking Blanton exhibits of Latin American art: "School of the South: El Taller Torres-Garc?a" in 1992 and "The Geometry of Hope: Latin American Art from the Patricia Phelps de Cisneros Collection" which premiered in 2007 and traveled to New York.

The Blanton has long been a pioneer in presenting Latin American art in the U.S. And a side gallery in the current exhibit brings together a handful of prints and paintings from the museum's collection of the School of the South, arguably one of the best owned by any museum in the world.

That mini exhibit-within-an-exhibit makes a comely connection. Matto might be unknown to most Blanton visitors. But now that the breadth of his achievement and his link to 20th century art are realized, he's bound to make it onto many lists of favorite Latin American artists.

jvanryzin@statesman.com; 445-3699