Glande fiction 1938

Roberto Matta made this artwork called 'Glande fiction,' and it's a mind-bender, right? I can only imagine Matta getting lost in the act of making this, shifting forms through colored pencils, layering and building up this landscape of the mind. I'm thinking about the push and pull between control and chance. You can see the hand of the artist in the marks, but there’s also a sense of letting go. I see some biomorphic shapes in there, so he was probably thinking about biology, like cells, and imagining the body. A lot of artists think about the body, and what it means to be a body in the world. It reminds me of the work of other surrealists like Miro and Tanguy, but Matta is doing his own thing. Artists are always talking to each other across time and space, inspiring each other's creativity. This piece feels like an invitation to embrace ambiguity and uncertainty, to allow for multiple interpretations and meaning, a reminder that painting is a place of embodied expression, where everything is open to possibility.