Qui d’Eux
Roberto Matta

Qui d’Eux by Roberto Matta is a folder with 10 color lithographs on Vélin d’Arches 270 gr paper and a text by Matta

Edition: 100 signed and numbered copies from 1 to 100 + XV copies H.C.

Sistan, Lugano; 1990

Matta interprets his reading of the adventures of Don Quixote de la Mancha in a fantastic and surreal way based on two essential concepts: love and battles, central ideas in Cervantes’ work. Quixote, struggling between illusion and reality, is a universal symbol and Matta seeks his deepest Iberian roots in his figure.

Matta works graphically on Don Quixote as he worked on La Araucana, the poem of the foundation of Chile by the Spaniard Alonso de Ercilla. In La Araucana look for a pre-Columbian American root, in “Don Quixote”, a Hispanic root.

Matta writes: “I identify with Don Quixote’s hallucinations and my drawings are made from his point of view. I begin to see hallucinations of situations with words. Literature provokes visual images, it is also a hallucination” (Interview with Barbara Rose, 1982).

Matta is fascinated by how Cervantes knows how to use irrationality and hallucination in his stories in an extraordinarily prophetic way, which anticipates surrealist writing, applying in literature his own pictorial technique that starts from dots and spots, taking up an idea of Leonardo da Vinci.

Matta creates a total of 90 drawings about Don Quixote and a personal script of the poem, as well as a series of oil paintings and large pastels animated by huge horses in battle scenes that are a little ironic, a little playful, in the spirit of Cervantes.