Translation by Stephen Germany

The Enigmatic Charm of Leo Matiz

“Real life is in black and white, day and night, ashes and charcoal, light and shadow. I think about the whiteness of light, the snowy foam of ocean waves, the stars, the blackness of caves, the depth of the sea, and the darkness of night. In all darkness there is a point of light that grows, as in the change during the wee hours when, from a tiny point on the horizon, the sun is born…”

Leo Matiz

Beyond the art of photography, Leo Matiz is the poet of vivid images and of unspoken words who gives us over to the unrestrained memory of the moment; moments frozen in time come to our memory through the contrast of light and shadow. Different chapters of our lives have been written in our memory and move through it like a sequence of photographs. However, the magic begins when we are able to retain these constant evocations permanently. This is the enigma and the charm that Leo Matiz has shared with us through his camera: the magic of his life and of his memories, captured for us with his reflective, artistic eye.

Looking through the magic lens of Leo Matiz is possible thanks to the Leo Matiz Foundation in Bogotá, Colombia, in collaboration with its president, Alejandra Matiz, and its director, Doris Alvarado. We would also like to thank Gabriel Figueroa, Jr. for his exceptional work of editing the photographs.

 

Exhibition Objectives

The main objectives of the exhibition are centered around two of the most significant artists of the 20th Century: Frida Kahlo and Leo Matiz. Frida Kahlo, seen through the eyes of the Colombian photographer, appears in twenty photographs that heighten both her everydayness and her mystical personality. In these images, we can see the imposing presence of the painter and the indelible impression that she left in the memory of Leo Matiz, who would return to Mexico fifty years later to relive his memories from the Blue House. On this trip, he was accompanied by the Italian designer Ángela Pintaldi who dressed up as Frida, allowing Matiz to penetrate into the memories of his earlier years.

 

Leo Matiz and Reclaimed Perception

This exhibition has as its primary objective to display the photographs of Frida Kahlo taken by Leo Matiz in 1946, as well as the recreation of these photographs with the assistance of Ángela Pintaldi in 1997.

Upon completing this study, there were two important considerations that have been integrated into the objectives. The first is the success that marked the professional life of Leo Matiz and the loss of his left eye at the end of the 1970s. The second is the poetry that can be seen in each of his photographs. For this reason, we would like to emphasize both of these facts in our exhibition guide and create an environment that allows these factors to be seen in the work of the artist.

 

Leo Matiz: the Traveler from Macondo

Leonet Matiz Espinosa was born on April 1, 1917 in Aracataca, Colombia to Tulio Matiz and Eva Espinoza, who were hardworking farmers and traders from Tolima, Colombia.

Even from his childhood, Matiz’ life was an adventure. Milking cows, helping his father in the fields, swimming in the river, and being around animals were some of his greatest loves. From then on, surprising scenes fill the story of his life with memories and images frozen in time. Everything enters his memory: Charles Lindbergh’s first airplane, the black Ford automobile called the “Ducktail”, the cinema in the Municipal Theater of Barranquillas, and his new shoes—sequences of an instant being reinterpreted over and over again.

Matiz’ shyness would lead him years later to create extraordinary caricatures, which allowed him to express himself with greater ease and assuredness towards the people with whom he came in daily contact. He either sold or gave away his works; they were almost never caricatures presenting social critiques, and although Matiz sometimes was involved in the political discourse, he always exhibited a measure of good humor. Some of his works were published in a journal that he created, TVO.

By 1933, Matiz’ first professional works were published in La Prensa de Barranquilla (The Barranquilla Press) and the journals Civilización (Civilization), Mundo al Día (The Daily World), and Canto y Filo (Edge and Blade). Although his father was opposed to him painting, the fruits of his work began to finance his travels within Colombia and, later, throughout Central America.

In 1937, Matiz began working for the journal El Tiempo (Time) as an artist, but 1939 marked perhaps one of his greatest transformations: his career as a photojournalist had begun. Enrique Santos Montejo “Calibán” motivated the young artist to delve into the magical world of photography; however, for Matiz, photography continued to be a diversion. Little by little, Matiz discovered his talent as a photographer, and over time his camera took the place of his pencil and paper.

In April 1941, the assassination of the revolutionary leader Leon Trotsky was the biggest headline in the news. Leo Matiz arrived in Mexico at one of the most significant moments in history. His partner, Celia Nichols, accompanied him on this extraordinary adventure.

Despite hunger and poverty, life in Mexico City continued, with chronicles, stories, and exhibitions. The journal Así (Thus) hired Matiz as a photojournalist in Mexico and the United States. Through his photographs and drawings, he discovered a devastated and desolate Mexico: prisoners, beggars, and the forgotten ones, as filmmaker Luis Buñuel would call them, were the most recurring subjects of Matiz’ photographs. For him, “Life in Mexico was full of drama and mystery.”

During his stay in Mexico, he developed relationships with important figures of the era: writers, poets, painters, filmmakers, artists, and bohemians. However, only a few of these figures made an indelible impression on him. These were Agustín Lara, his confidant, friend, and conversation-mate; Gabriel Figueroa, his master in the use of chiaroscuro and the camera in cinematography; and David Alfaro Siqueiros, the renowned muralist with whom he made a series of photographs to complete the mural Cuauhtémoc against the myth and who pressured Matiz unjustly to leave the country because of these very photographs. Finally, there was the polemical and disconcerting pair of painters—Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo—whom he photographed casually at the Blue House. Paradoxically, fifty years later, the imposing personality of Frida Kahlo would motivate Leo Matiz to recreate a meeting between his memory and the present.

Upon leaving Mexico at the end of the 1940s and after having obtained the Mexican press’ prize for best photojournalist as well as being named one of the ten best photographers in the world, Matiz, a tireless traveler, continued his photographic work various countries. Supported by working for Reader’s Digest, he traveled across the globe, fulfilling his most sought-after dreams. As he put it, “I was overwhelmed by a yearning to know.” In 1951, he founded the Leo Matiz Gallery in Bogotá, where the first exhibition of the Colombian painter Fernando Botero was displayed.

In the 1970s an event happened that would change his destiny—a lamentable event would keep him from photography for several years and would make him reconsider the meaning of life and the significance of the loss of vision. The tireless photographer stopped traveling; not only had he lost a sense of meaning and part of his vision, he had also lost his creative and eloquent spirit. During these eighteen years of incertitude, Matiz had rediscovered the significance of his left eye as well as his next contribution to the history of photography. During this unproductive period of his life, Matiz approached what might be one of his last works of great transcendence—the reinterpretation of the moment and of memory through a perspective clouded by the passing of time.

In 1997, Leo Matiz returned to Mexico and produced the book Men of the Field, and he received the Filo d’argento prize in the Vecchio Palace in Florence. He displayed his exhibition Matiz-Siqueiros: Fifty Years Later in the Giubbe Rosse café in Florence. During the same year, Matiz was able to capture anew the hidden and enigmatic identity of Frida Kahlo in the image of the Italian designer Ángela Pintaldi.

Pintaldi is the central theme of Matiz’ recent series of photographs and, although not as casual as the series from the 1940s in Coyoacán, a moment is recreated in black and white which sends us back to the atmosphere of Mexico during that period. As Leo Matiz would say, “I am going to die peacefully, thinking that no one will surpass what I lived in Mexico. I believe that I lived there the best century of existence.”

In 1998, the government of Colombia paid national homage to its most important photographer of the twentieth century. As part of the celebration, the anthology The Metaphor of the Eye, written by Matiz’ biographer, Miguel Ángel Góngora, with the collaboration of Alejandra Matiz, was published, along with a CD-ROM and a television documentary. The National Library of Colombia and the Diners Gallery collaborated for this tribute year, setting up exhibits of the photographs of Leo Matiz. The Leo Matiz Foundation was created, to which the rights to Matiz’ photographs were given. Alejandra Matiz was designated as president of the Foundation with the aim of giving continuity to the promotion of Leo Matiz’ work. Leo Matiz died on October 24, 1998 in Santa Fé de Bogotá, Colombia.