“I have tried to act as if I were located at the centre of the cube and the canvas, rather than being a window in front of me, it was one of the six sides of the cube”. Matta wrote in 1965 with regard to his concept of the “open cube”. Following three decades during which he had aimed to depict multiple dimensions on the twodimensional surface of the canvas, Matta’s investigations spilled over the edges of the canvas and advanced towards the viewer. L'Honni aveuglant represents the final consequences of an evolution through which he achieved a new type of pictorial space.
For Matta the “open cube” was the total work of art that surrounds the viewer and makes that person its protagonist. The possibility of extending his idea to a hypothetical viewer’s entire field of vision resulted in an unprecedentedly intense fusion of interior and exterior reality. Mere physical space was replaced by sensory space and the perspectival was replaced by the potential. Matta explained his way of representing reality in an interview of 1959:
“Let me give you an example: if we see four people around an apple; that is what we see in perspective. But if we also know the relations between the four people and the apple, we see in a potential manner. One is ill, the other is hungry, the third is a child... That changes everything!”
By taking into account not just the external appearance of things but also their infinite interior motivations, Matta revealed the complex universe concealed behind appearances. He considered himself a visionary whose role in society was to make others see what they could not appreciate themselves. Through immersion in the “open cube” and the abandonment of traditional perspective the viewer’s dormant conscience would awake and the world could thus be transformed.