A Grave Situation 1946

Roberto Matta made this painting, "A Grave Situation", with oil on canvas, and you can see right away that the way he's pushing the paint around isn’t about trying to show you something real, but something felt, something thought. Look at how the brown in the lower left kind of bleeds into the ochre background, it's like the whole thing is breathing. I think it's a super generous painting, because Matta isn't trying to hide his moves; you can see how he’s layering and scratching back into the paint, revealing the history of its making. And he uses these see-through lines to build a space, a world, that you can look *through*. Like he's not building a box, but an idea. Matta reminds me a lot of Gorky, another artist who wasn't afraid to let his paintings be messy and weird. Both of them help us see that painting is more than just making a picture. It’s about making a space for thinking, for feeling, for dreaming.