Roberto Matta

Roberto Matta 
Untitled
Circa 1980
Terracotta

The Chilean artist Roberto Sebastian Matta recognised in Tarquinia the spirit and culture of an original, authentic art, untainted by European education. After living for many years between Rome, Paris and the Aeolian Islands, in the 1970s he settled permanently near the Etruscan city. Here, he devoted himself primarily to ceramics — a medium he had discovered in the mid-1950s in Albisola, Liguria — which became central to his artistic research.

In Tarquinia, the Amerindian, totemic and metamorphic elements already present in his work intertwined with Etruscan influences, through a practice that exalted both matter and memory. The fusion of Etruscan archetypes with African, Egyptian and pre-Columbian elements gave rise to a period of extraordinary creativity between the late 1970s and the 1980s.

Thus were born his anthropomorphic terracotta Totems, works that evoke figures such as Tuchulcha, the underworld demon, or the lids of Villanovan cinerary urns — not in archaeological fidelity, but with powerful symbolic intensity.