... Here she proposes the work of the last two years, postulating the sum total of experiences carried out up until today: the 'swallowed' cathedrals (with their echoes à la Valéry), of the unconscious or of space, burnt materials and acrylic colours, islands suspended in the depths of galaxies and monuments to man's architecture saved, like relics, by waves of luminous air.
The most recent visions are those which are freest and most terse. The missiles have disappeared, the most decipherable signs, the technical virtuosities, the perforated apexes and the cuts (from which Fontana peeped, pleased with the homage paid by the young, blond painter). One wanders through cosmic forests which can also be pantographs of cobwebs woven in the days of horror, although scientifically refined - Doré, if one wants, but revisited by Bradbury.
The technique with which Luciana Matalon has composed these panels of both her and our anxiety is a mixed one, impastos of colours disseminated à la Pollock (just to be clear about the question).
The extraterrestrial areas are favoured, blues or reds or sky-blues and are declaredly chemical. This scientific complicity - or insidiousness - within a scenario antedating Adam diffuses a melancholy light while, at the same time, it presents the hope of a survival. We think that Luciana Matalon's dream is concerned with a project: that one of the other celestial seas she has painted, the face of the earth disfigured, is also - and who knows where - to lead that memory of the felicitous existence of mankind to free and uncontaminated spaces.

Alberico Sala
Milan, May 1972 - From the presentation of the exhibition held at the Galleria dello Scudo in Verona