BIOGRAPHY
     Youth in Santiago
     Rooted in Roma
     Political engagement against Pinochet
     Exile in France

EXHIBITIONS, PUBLICATIONS & TEXTS

CRITICS

Youth in Santiago

Raúl Matta Villagrán was born in 1942 in Santiago, Chile. He took his first painting classes at the age of 14 at the Ñuñoa Cultural Centre, under the direction of the painters Gregorio de la Fuente and Mario Neira. It was clear to him from a young age that he would become a painter. When he was 18, he entered the School of Art at the Catholic University of Santiago.

Rooted in Roma

At 21, he decided to leave Chile and move to Europe. Arriving in Spain, he divided his time between Barcelona and Madrid, where he gained admission to the San Fernando Fine Arts Academy. The following year, he moved to Rome, a city that he felt was intimately tied to his vocation as an artist. During this time, he signed his paintings as “Matta”. In Italy in 1965, he met up with the well-known Surrealist painter Roberto Matta, who was his uncle once removed. Matta advised him to change the signature on his paintings, suggesting he use the name “Agrán”, derived from his mother’s name, Villagrán. The young Raúl reluctantly agreed out of respect for Matta’s position as an acclaimed painter who was the same age as his own father, and became known from that time as Raúl Agrán. He thus began his life as an artist under this name. His work was exhibited in Rome in 1966 at the first UNESCO Salon, followed by an exhibition at the Galleria Stagni (Rome, 1967) and in Florence. He also took part in a number of avant-garde cultural events and movements, and spent several months living in Paris in 1968. Motivated by his convictions about the art market, he decided in the early 1970s to stop exhibiting and exclusively sell his work to art collectors.

Political engagement against Pinochet

In 1973, he became politically-active following Pinochet’s military coup in Chile. After six years of intense political activism in Italy, he returned to Chile with his partner to continue his opposition to the dictatorship through clandestine efforts. It was here that his first child, a son, was born in 1980.

Exile in France

His period of political activism came to an end in 1981 when he was forced into political exile in France. He resettled with his family near the Bastille area in Paris with the help of his friend, the conductor Paul Mauriat. His second son was born at this time.

He once again devoted himself entirely to painting. He began to show his work again, holding several exhibitions in France (Paris), Italy (Florence, Reggio Emilia, Spoleto), Austria (Salzburg) and Switzerland (Grenchen), and sold his work to collectors. This was the most intense and prolific period of his career, even though he maintained a certain distance from the art market in order to stay true to his determination as an artist to “make his mark” on the timeline of art.

In the same spirit of critical and poetic engagement, he wrote numerous texts, including essays (Dans les coulisses de l’oeil, Le Magnétisme Capricieux, among others), poetic prose (Les images distillées) and six stage plays (including El Presentimiento, which was performed in Saint-Denis in France and in Innsbruck in Austria). He was also commissioned to illustrate several novels and poetry collections for French and Italian publishers (such as the Zulma, Dumerchez and Alfabeto Urbano publishing houses).

Following a change in his family situation in 1993, he left central Paris to live in the outer suburb of L’Île Saint-Denis, where he was invited to pursue his artistic work in a factory owned by his friend Jean-Loup Desrosiers. The use of this location significantly boosted his productivity and served as his studio space for the next fifteen years.

In 2017, Raúl Agran’s work includes a large number of paintings. He now lives and works in the Paris suburb of Montreuil.

Having reached his seventies, the time has come to share his work more widely and to reconnect with his original name. Fifty years after his meeting with Roberto Matta in Rome, he made the decision to sign his work from now on as  “Matta Agrán”, echoing a dedication written by Roberto Matta on one of his drawings in 1965:  “From one Matta to another…”.