In 1965 he exhibited Le Cube Ouvert at the Kunstmuseum in Lucerne. The exhibition includes part of the polyptych L'Espace de l'Espèce and a series of paintings of a political nature: The United Snakes of America: Alabama, Vietnam, Santo Domingo.
Participates in L'Écart absolu, Surrealism's eleventh and final exhibition, at Galerie l'OEil.
From the left: 1. Matta, photo by Lagarde, 2.Matta, photo by Daniel FrasnayIn June/July 1966, new exhibition at Galerie Jolas in Paris in which a series of ten paintings covering walls and ceilings. Hubert Damisch publishes, as a catalog, a letter to Matta, accompanied by the painter's cartoon response. In September, in Lima, Peru, he exhibits Le cube ouvert. Matta theorizes his relationship with a space in which the viewer becomes an actor and the space of the painting becomes volume.
Matta, Panarea, 1966
Matta, Boissy, 1966In 1967, Matta exhibited at the Senior Gallery in Rome 12 drawings on the Vietnam War, others that illustrate vacations in Positano, Saint-Tropez, and Panarea. On February 14, he participates in Paris in a demonstration in support of the Vietnamese people organized by the Peace Movement, and on the occasion of the Têt festival, a painting of his, 10 meters long, begun in '65, L'Escalade ou Burn, Baby Burn, is exhibited in the Valle de la Municipality where the meeting takes place. In March, he figures in a group show in Havana. Here, with a group of students from the School of Fine Arts creates a 3-by-10-meter mural, Para que la Libertad no se convierta en estatua, on the cue of a drawing made by the students themselves.
In December of that year an exhibition of his drawings opened at the Galerie Iolas, and the Musée de Saint-Denis organized the retrospective Etre avec-Reveil Matta. Pour une posticce évolutionnaire, in which which displays 24 canvases from '39 to '67. In the catalog, Matta talks about his relationship with the world for a revolutionary poetics. He tells of the Spanish War, the awareness of what the concentration camps were of the great monstrosities of our time, because among the great transparencies of our century, there is unconsciousness, irresponsibility, distrust, resentments that must explode to be “with” a creative and revolutionary manifestation. (Matta. “Elements for a biography” Cat expo museum in St Denis, 1967).
Purchases an old convent, La Bandita, in Tarquinia, which he turns into a studio and home.
In 1968 at the Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, in an exhibition organized by Patrick Waldberg,Totems et Tabous, Lam, Matta, Penalba, Matta exhibited, in a highly original, the entire L'Espace de L'Espèce series, twenty canvases made from '59 to '68. The exhibition will be then moved to the Nord-Aviation factory, occupied by striking workers.
During the famous French May, Matta took part in all sorts of collective demonstrations: debates, posters, works made by several hands... and illustrates, with comics, Pour la guerrilla dans l'art, Alain Jouffroy's book, Abolition de l'art. His painting La chasse aux adolescents reproduced in the collective book Art et contextation. Invited to the Havana Cultural Congress, he chaired Commission No. 2 and gave a speech in which he explains that La Guerrilla interior is also the title of a large painting from 1967. Works on a series of sculptures, Hiroscemia, at Berrocal's studio in Verona.
He meets Germana Ferrari.
In 1969, new exhibition of recent drawings and sculptures at the Iolas Gallery in Milan, then at the Centre Culturel in Villepariris. Talks with organizers about the theme “Revolution is Architecture.” Silkeborg Museum in Denmark publishes a catalog of Matta's etchings.
During the summer of 1970, Werner Hoffmann organized at the Nationalgalerie in Berlin a retrospective of Matta's work in which, for the first time, six canvases measuring ten meters each. During the summer, he organized an exhibition of cartoons in Tarquinia with, among others, Siné and Wolinski. In that year Matta travels extensively: in Egypt, at the invitation of the newspaper Al Abram he participates in a meeting with Arab intellectuals and artists; in Cuba he took part in an exhibition of graphic art; in Zambia, in Tanzania, and finally in Angola, he makes a series of paintings in support of the Liberation Movement of Augustino Neto.
The birth of his daughter Alisée inspired him to paint and write a poem entitled Dar à la vida un luz.
On September 4, Salvatore Allende, a friend of his, is elected president of the Republic of Chile.
In January-February, he exhibited at the Galerie Iolas in Paris. In March 1971, the workers of Peugeot organised, with Jean-Pierre Jouffroy, at the Maison des Arts et Loisirs in Sochaux, a retrospective exhibition of Matta - L'èntrée est à la sortie - in which numerous significant large paintings. In October, as part of the Chilean Week, at the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Le Havre, another extensive retrospective of the artist's work, with 24 paintings.
In November, Matta left for Chile where he met the recently arrived Fidel Castro. He participates in that occasion in all the collective activities of the Ramona Parra Brigade (paintings, murals, posters debates...) who offered him a flag with all the signatures.
He painted El primer gol del pueblo chileno for the municipal swimming pool in La Granja. He paints Odisseano.
He collects non-European art objects, especially from Pacific cultures.
Matta and Pablo Neruda, 1971
From the left: 1. Wilfred Lam and Matta, 2. Fidel Castro, Matta and Gabriel Garcia MarquezExchanges with Felix Guattari, Regis Debray and also with Dominique de Villepin, Jean-Pierre Chevenement, Michel Cassé, astrophysicist. In January-February, he exhibited at the Iolas Gallery in New York, nine paintings, grouped under the theme of the Honni Aveuglant, hung from the ceiling and walls to give the illusion of a cube. In the same year he donated two of his works (now disappeared) to the Museo de la Solidaridad in Santiago: Hagamosnos la guerrilla interior para parir un humbre nuevo and Ojo con los desarolladores.
Exhibition at the Galerie Iolas, Matta où?, and at the Galerie Creuzevault, Matta qui? After the 11 September coup in Chile, the municipalities of Livorno, Bologna and Ravenna organised solidarity events and an exhibition, Per il Cile con Matta. With many paintings related to political events: Les Roses sont belles, Morire per amore (Che Guevara), Passage de la mort à la vie or 11 September 1973 and a text-pamphlet: Military Shame after Auschwitz. Ferrara's Galleria Civica d'Arte Moderna is organising a large exhibition of recent works. The preamble to the exhibition reads: The whole exhibition is a painting and the text Being a world. Being human.
“Art is a promise of reality that is obtained by the desire for what does not exist. I doubt that it is through the eye that we can 'see', but we have always applied ourselves to this 'technique' called painting, which is supposed to give us the feeling of being united, of being human. The seizure of the world is the seizure of the struggles that surround us and decide our fate. To 'see' these struggles we need more than images, we need to awaken the subversive imagination subversive imagination that shatters the received form and ideas in us and generates the poetic state, that state at the centre of each one. It must be achieved. Very often we call art the exercise of techniques of the self that are not 'wet', that are touch, that are only triggered in the centre of the heart or head and only awaken the sentimentality. Everything depends on the depth of doubt; the eye and the lens are ONE”.
From the left: 1. Matta, Germana e Alisée, La Bandita, Tarquinia, 2. Matta at the Bonvicini foundry, Verona
Maison de la Culture exhibition, Amiens, March 1973At the beginning of 1974, an exhibition opened in Rome and then in Terni, consisting of a series of works mostly dated mostly dated 1971, collected under the title Bella Ciao. In May, Matta exhibits in Rome, at Palazzo Durini, objects (jewellery clothes, silk-screen prints) and furniture made with Tarquinia craftsmen: Wooden totem chair, La Maja Desnuda, Ubu seat, Etruscoludens chandelier... In June, on the occasion of a new exhibition at the Galerie Iolas in Paris, he exhibited a series of thirteen canvases painted the previous year, whose overall title is Ojoserl'Oeil-Etre. Shortly afterwards, during the summer, the Kestner Geselischaft in Hanover organised an extensive retrospective of his most recent works. In autumn, the painter again participated in the Biennale in Venice Biennale, which that year was entitled: For a democratic and anti-fascist culture, presenting in particular the murals and posters created for the Brigada Ramona Parra. In November of the same year, the municipality of Venissieux held an exhibition featuring several of his large paintings. Following Pinochet's coup d'état, he was deprived of his Chilean nationality. He would have had a Cuban and an Algerian passport. In 1979, he became a French citizen.
“Dismissed of Chilean nationality, and renationalised French, Cuban, Algerian with residence on earth”.
From the left: 1. Matta at La Bandita with his work “Così fan tutte”, 2. Ramuntcho and Matta, Paris, 1974
From the left: 1. Man Ray and Matta, 2. Man Ray, Matta and Iolas