1950 had been the year when Alloway's scope became international, but the really significant change in his criticism occurs right at the beginning of 1951 in a longer review of a Matta exhibition at the ICA. In this, Alloway writes in a style that was to become associated with his Independent Group (IG) mode of writing between 1952 and 1955. Connoisseurship and simple evaluation is replaced by a far more dense and demanding interpretation of the artist's activities: “In the new concept of ‘continuous creation’ we have, perhaps, the physicists’ version of automatism in modern art. Matta is the painter of non-Euclidean space. A controlled automatism, compatible with extensive and monumental design, is at the root of his method of creating the vertiginous world-picture.” He fused automatic Surrealism and Expressionism but, in contrast to Tanguy, “… Matta is not haunted by the horizon and Kandinsky does not, like Matta, confuse us between galaxy and viscera. Matta refuses to acknowledge the distinction between cosmic and microscopic configurations.”

A significant progression for Alloway was viewed as a regressive move by some of the readers of Art News and Review, two of whom wrote from Cambridge University decrying the critic's “brand of pretentious and esoteric nonsense.” Alloway's contrasting of Matta and Kandinsky by analogy with “galaxy and viscera” particularly incensed them:

Alloway published a lengthy reply that made substantive points. First, he attacks the readers’ complaint that artworks cannot be said to have “verbal equivalents” to visual forms, suggesting that their opinion is an implicit assumption of Roger Fry's “formal approach.” Formalism and all it stood for, from Fry to Clement Greenberg, was Alloway's enduring enemy until its final overthrow in the late 1960s.