Guided by the invisible

Surrealism the art movement was the child from the marriage of the minds of two men Andre Breton and Sigmond Frued.In Freud's theory of the unconscious, Breton discovered the way to access the realm inhabited by the self and he described it as "the chance meeting on a dissecting table of a sewing machine and an umbrella."Surrealism became the poetic springboard for a new art the new found context in which the self and its vicissitudes could be observed as well as experienced.Surrealism became the source of two current;the imagined which arose from the intellect and the intuited which arose from experience.

The surrealist-painter, poet, photographer sought to unfold his world of fantasy, be it daydream or nightmare, the world where his perceptions meet what Carl Jung called the collective unconscious.In these hidden depths mankind is revealed in symbols and  to those who learn this visual non verbal language of forms the half concealed becomes deeply and richly revealed.Surrealism might deal with dreams, fantasy, nightmares ,voyages one has never made or an insistence on openness to the unexpected in everyday world-the sheer strangeness of people and objects encountered by chance. 


There is a degree of truth in surrealism since the images are born from experiences or a sense of deja vu."I think everything we do is autobiographical.So one of my reasons for painting was really to escape my biography.Autobiography in any case is not a blatant lie.It is at best a distorting mirror." Dorthea Tanning.

Dorthea Tanning "Birthday" .Most of the art was self referential in nature.Portraiture dominated and self portraiture was essential whether presented as a straightforward depiction or as an autobiographical story or as a symbolic still life.


Children think in idiosyncratic images until they learn words to symbolize them and when afraid they assume their fears come from outside rather than from within.To assuage their uneasiness they might invent irrational explanations such as interpreting a noise caused by a monster hiding somewhere in the room.Childhood experiences informed the iconography of Alice Rahon and Remidios Varo.Rahon spent three years of her early childhood in France immobolized in a cast that went from neck to ankles.While she spent long periods in the garden alone nature nurtured her thoughts.She began painting childlike impressions from nature.Varo struggled over the conflict between dependency and autonomy which is reflected in her work.

Remidios Varo's difficulty in sepearating and individuating is expressed by a figure, paralyzed by inertia,who appears to lose her identity becoming like the chair she sits on in "Mimicry"

Rahon reacts as a child might, wondering about the pain that exploding fireworks will inflict on seven Judas dolls in "Piedad por los judas (Mercy for the Judas Effigies)