Painting

Exhibition  

December 16, 2023 – January 28, 2024
🏡  Watowa Gallery

The Bachelors, Eighty and One Hundred Years Later

This project is both a family homage and a contemporary experiment. It takes as its starting point the 1943 painting by my grandfather, surrealist painter Roberto Matta, entitled She was stripped of her bride, even by her bachelors—a free and cosmic reinterpretation of Marcel Duchamp’s iconic Large Glass. In Matta’s version, interstellar landscapes, black machines, and alchemical metaphors overlap, evoking cosmic forces, distillations, and metamorphoses.

Reactivating this motif eighty, then one hundred years later, I choose to situate myself in continuity with the unfinished processes of Duchamp and Matta: a creation without a definitive endpoint, always suspended, always reinterpreted. The project extends the logic of the Large Glass—its structural complexity, its open temporality—into our present age, marked by ecological and technological upheavals. Alchemical operations (combustion, sublimation, distillation, fusion, precipitation) thus become metaphors for current planetary transformations: global warming, melting glaciers, earthquakes, atomic mutations.

The work seeks to place opposing pairs in tension: micro / macro, earth / cosmos, opaque / transparent, mechanical / organic, art / society. This dialectic is not resolved but sustained in a plastic experiment where each contrast generates new forms.

To achieve this, I employ digital painting and AI-based generative art, approached as a contemporary form of surrealist automatic writing. Where Matta explored the unconscious and Duchamp the randomness of symbolic mechanics, I explore the “machinic unconscious” of algorithms—their unpredictable drifts and poetic glitches. These tools extend and displace the surrealist legacy into the digital era, inventing unstable, spectral images that resist fixation.

By pursuing this intergenerational and transhistorical dialogue, The Bachelors, Eighty and One Hundred Years Later attempts to sketch the contours of an integral ecology, where nature, technology, and spirit intertwine. It is a research into how art—through alchemy, surrealism, and contemporary technologies—can still shape narratives that connect the human and cosmic, the individual and planetary.

The first version of the painting received the Watowa Prize, awarded by Miwa Kutsuna, in December 2023.