The Space Between: Matta and Matta-Clark

This text was part of a talk/performance, thanks to an invitation from The Met Museum of Art, New York, Friday May 2, 2025.

TRANSCRIPT:

My view on Gordon Matta-Clark isn’t about the cuts. I’m not obsessed with the voids or the thrill of destruction. I see movement. A pulse. A force, propulsive and forward-thinking. As if his ideas carried entropy in their veins. A burning need to unsettle space. To open it up for others. A collective ritual of seeing what we’ve trained ourselves to ignore. Inevitably, Matta-Clark’s ideas lead me to look more closely at his relationship with Roberto Matta.

Why revisit the works of two artists from the 20th century, Roberto Matta and his son Gordon, who also happen to be father and son? Because their stories crack open questions that feel urgent now. Because their lives, estranged and parallel, speak to exile, imagination, and the legacy of artistic bloodlines. Because in the fissures between them, there is something we recognize in ourselves.

Roberto Matta studied architecture and interior design at the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile. In 1933 he moved to Paris to work for the famed architect Le Corbusier. A year later, in 1934, he traveled to Madrid, where he was introduced to Salvador Dalí, who encouraged him to show his drawings to André Breton, the leader of the Surrealist movement. From there, Matta found refuge in the myth of the American Dream. He fled a Europe collapsing under fascism and landed in New York, where his career bloomed among Surrealists and New York School painters.

His canvases stretched the unconscious across vast cosmic planes. He painted dreams like they were blueprints. Landscapes of the psyche. Architectures of the mind.

One of his most powerful works from that period is 'Being With' (*Être Avec*), painted in 1946 while living in New York. This work reflects the convergence of architectural sensibility and his distress over a world shattered by war. As you stand before *Being With*, you’re not just looking, you’re entering Matta’s response to the devastation of World War II. Machines menace. Bodies twist and strain, caught in the gears of violence. The figures hover between totem and shadow, evoking Giacometti but speaking in Matta’s own voice. This painting doesn’t just show a broken world, it invites you to stand inside its fracture. 

In front of you, *Being With* breathes complexity and sorrow, eroticism and chaos, structure on the verge of collapse. And I can’t help but see Gordon tracing a line from this very moment, this very canvas. A line that doesn’t replicate, but refracts. Gordon, too, was 'being with', with buildings that were abandoned, with communities on the edge, with histories split and reframed. Where Matta mapped psychic turbulence through painted space, Gordon mapped social fracture through real space. His acts of cutting are, in a way, gestures of presence. His voids carry the same restless energy, the same desire to stay inside the brokenness and find a form of belonging there.

What line can we draw from this surrealist immigrant, sculpting the metaphysical, to his son Gordon, born of rupture, of absence, of the American experiment? Isn’t that the dream of every immigrant? To escape collapse. To offer your children a future beyond the margins?

But Gordon didn’t build on his father’s legacy, he cut through it.

Raised mostly apart from Roberto, Gordon’s life was shaped by his mother and by cities in transition. He trained as an architect, yes. But his buildings were actions, not structures. He didn’t sketch elevations, he removed them. He turned condemned spaces into questions. Each slice in a wall, each gaping absence in a house became an invitation, to gather, to reflect, to inhabit emptiness.

In 1971, Gordon traveled to Chile. Not just to witness Allende’s early government, but to meet his father. To trace the thread back. At the same time, the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes was undergoing a deep transformation. A new gallery space, Sala Matta, was being carved beneath the museum to house Roberto’s work. Gordon arrived as the building was literally being reshaped to accommodate the father. A perfect metaphor.

What did he think, stepping into the bones of a building remade for someone who never fully made space for him? Maybe he felt the weight of legacy there, not as inheritance, but as mass. Something to excavate.

In New York, we had the Young Lords. We had a city unraveling and reforming itself. Gordon’s art emerged from these contexts. FOOD, the restaurant he co-founded in SoHo, wasn’t just about cuisine. It was about community. About art as nourishment. About collectivism. A gesture of space open to others. A kitchen where absence was replaced with presence, shared rituals, served belonging.

But Gordon, like his father, also looked inward, into atoms, into light, into the space between walls, between words. His cuts weren’t violent. They were openings, not wounds, but windows. He didn’t slice buildings to express pain. He opened them so others could walk through, feel the draft of history.

Laurie Anderson once said that Gordon made cuts because of his fractured relationship with his father. Maybe. But I think it’s more than rupture. I think it’s reach. I think his art wasn’t about breaking, it was about revealing. Making the unseen visible. A letter not to a father, but to all of us. And what if those voids, the ones Gordon left, aren’t empty at all? What if they’re full of echoes, of possible futures, of invisible inheritances, of unspoken questions?

Roberto painted the insides of the mind. Gordon revealed the insides of our cities. One imagined a new reality. The other cracked open the one we live in. And between them, perhaps, is a bridge. One that spans the subconscious and the civic, the personal and the public. One we’re still crossing. Because every time we cut into the past, every time we open what’s been sealed, every time we choose to gather instead of retreat, aren’t we too participating in that legacy?

Emily Dickinson wrote, “Art is a house that tries to be haunted.” Claude Debussy reminds us, “A cut is a note in the music of space.”

Gordon Matta-Clark died young, at 35, leaving the Matta behind, and leaving us with questions, unfinished gestures, and spaces still trembling with possibility.



Written by Sokio, for the perfromance The Space Between: Matta and Matta-Clark, in preparation of his upcoming presentation of Splitting/Absence, Section New York, an opera about Gordon Matta-Clark.
Thanks to Marty Preciado and all the Met team. Thanks to Teenage Engineering for their continuous support. Special thanks to Jessamyn Fiore, from The Estate of Gordon Matta-Clark.