The symbolic structure of the Chilean way of life of a family of Spanish-Basque-French origin was in crisis.² Mattas departure is but a terminal symptom of this malady. Matta left behind his family connections in order to return to his origins. Sergio Larraín had opened his mind to architectonic and visual-arts modernism. Mattas contribution to this dialogue is Le Corbusier. It is not by chance that upon arriving in Paris, he went to work at his office.

Chilean oligarchy erected a social and political enclave whose references are always outside, in an origin that is close enough in time to satisfy its anguish of affiliation. At the turn of the century the outside, that is to say, the point of reference in relation to family roots, is France. Yet, the fact that in his graduation thesis Matta set down the terms of another conflict is symptom enough of the changes going on. Finally, to the rationalism of Gropius and Le Corbusier, Matta opposes the organic structure of the female body, making an analogy between pose and floor plan.³ There is here a rebellion against a self-punishing architecture from which Matta will distance himself via a model of drawing whose antecedents lay in the relationship between body and mold, assigning furniture the function of a mold that is not exactly a negative of form but rather a surface of contention. In the absence of a homein Chile or in Francefurniture becomes-home,⁴ in a kind of furniturizing of corporeality.

In 1938, from Mexico, Breton sent a telegram to the magazine Minotaure recommending Matta. In Number 11, Matta published "Mathematique sensiblearchitecture du temps." This text reproduces the intensity of purpose of his 1932 graduation thesis. If in his thesis the conflict lay in the anatomical floor plans, in Minotaure the conflict lay in the curvature of the body. The tool used here and there is the same: drawing. That is to say, the line that reproduces the layout of the struggle in the bodys becoming-home, replicated by the becoming-body of the house: like a line left behind by the scar of movement.⁵

What Matta takes with him when he leaves Chile is a perception of the natural world; what he leaves behindas ballastis a perception of the social world as a malady associated with travel. His social circle constrains him in three aspects: family, religion and politics. This primary perception would be the basis of a symptom of inverted anthropophagy.

Alain Jouffroy, in the text he wrote for the catalog for the retrospective at the Centre Georges Pompidou (1985) establishes a key hypothesis with respect to Mattas relationship with Chile upon his departure. He says Matta est chilien [Matta is Chilean]. That is, an artist that chie les liens,⁶ an artist that expels (defecates) relationships. But this very act of expulsion is also, by anteposition, a statement of belonging. His vomiting, what he ingests, is also to swallow, to devour all that has been denied to him. Or rather; all things whose assimilation establishes a connection between man and territory without the mediation of social relations. This implies a primary denial of the individual because, if one goes by Mattas statements, one must weed out the cumulus of information that saturates and retouches representations of himself, of his position in the history of art. When he discusses his first morphologies and the titles he gave his work in the 40s, he refers to a denial of the individual while at the same time he reaffirms individuality. What must be established here is his own notion of the individual. And this is not merely a case of affirmative denial via the devouring of the Other. If there is only nature, there is no Other. At this point, this is quite a Robinsonesque (Crusoe) point of view. Natureat least in the early Mattais a working surface for direct intervention in which he views himself as an exhaled-penetrator.⁷ He reproduces the colonizing impetus of his ancestry. A symptom of its decline, the artist Matta is the figure of his own return to the origins of the erstwhile penetrating force that must now journey to regain the lost energy. The "genitality" of his purpose cannot but conjure the ghost of flaccidity. Chile is a country whose territory has been represented on maps in a double ambiguity between ripping (indenting) and erection.