The Surrealist revolution was as important, if not more so, than that of abstract art. Suddenly, people were led to understand that, in order to touch the reality of the world, one should not concentrate on a “faithful” description of appearances, but let the “dictation of thought emerge, in the absence of any control exercised by reason outside of any aesthetic or moral concern.”
An exhibition celebrates the Manifesto of Surrealismwritten 100 years ago by André Breton and published a year before the group’s first official exhibition. Following an invitation from independent curator Yves Sheriff to participate in the celebrations requested by the Maison André Breton, Roger Bellemare and Christian Lambert have brought together, until September 7, some twenty ancient and contemporary works, European and Canadian. These well-imagined encounters are one of the great interests of this exhibition.
This is an opportunity to reflect on the current state of this movement, which still fascinates, certainly, but in its watered-down version by a general public who does not always know what it is about and who sees above all a fantastic aspect. We love Salvador Dalí for his easiest works. And the adjective “surrealist” is used nowadays in popular culture to define all sorts of incredible situations or simply a little out of the ordinary.
As Bellemare explains, the movement “is still relevant, but it doesn’t have the same anti-religious and anti-everything firepower as it did 100 years ago.” But, in the same breath, he adds that “surrealism has always existed and is present everywhere.” He says that he recently read “in the newspaper, the story of a woman killed by an ambulance in front of the Bonsecours Market… For me, that’s surrealism”! The presentation text even explains that “surrealism WAS since writing, Lascaux and the Bible, in different incarnations when André Breton delivered, in 1924, a sophisticated and poetic measure that brought people together but without a certified future.”
Has the surrealist legacy become, like that of the ready-made, debased, watered down, digested by bourgeois good taste? “There was a flowering of this movement in the 1940s and 1950s, which became more and more abstract. Let’s think of Riopelle. But it was indeed diluted afterwards…” explains Roger Bellemare. It was diluted all the more because the emancipation from morality in contemporary art is no longer a defended value at all. It is even increasingly repressed by an art world that has become very moralistic.
Artists’ words
Lyne Lapointe loves “the surrealism of the realism of Pipa pipa the toad – a mystery animal, one of the strangest in the animal kingdom, because the female gives birth through the back” – as much as that present in ” Giantess of Leonora Carrington, whose paintings transcend the traditional limits of portraiture.” Of Carrington, she appreciates “the hybrid pictorial universe between the animal and the human, incorporating sometimes deformed feminine creatures. Her concerns about social injustices and inequalities shone through in her work and she was a pioneer of feminism.”
For Maclean, this movement is still relevant because it embodies “a window into a universal world accessing a creativity otherwise suppressed by convention and social norms. A reaction to industrialization, to the mechanical reproduction of not only the image, but also the object. A reaction to a tumultuous time that included a collective trauma, that of the First World War. What surrealism “invented” or “discovered” has always been there, inside of us. And it will always be there. We see it in Philip Guston and Betty Goodwin, as well as in a myriad of contemporary artists: Nicole Eisenman, Marcel Dzama… What appeals to me most is surrealism’s strange conjoined twin, Dadaism. At its heart is the found object that possesses the power of surprise; of unexpected associations; a power located in play. The found object invites a transformation in perception.”
Mathieu Gaudet explains that “what [l’]interest in surrealism lies in its power to transgress codes to change our relationship to the world. This transgression operates when the codes are present and fracture in the work. “Realism” becomes “surrealism”. It changes our relationship to works and projects a thought towards the future. The representation of the world, of an encoded reality, is short-circuited to give rise to a lateral and unexpected vision. In the work that I am presenting, a felled and truncated tree lies on an innocuous sidewalk. The enhancement of its circular forms in yellow modifies its presence and juxtaposes a kind of unexpected geometry in this context. From this work, I observe the cut tree trunks as potential objects of abstraction, a drift from known forms towards a representation that would have the power to make us notice things differently.
Martha Townsend tells us that “Surrealism opened the way to many subjects and forms of expression in art by defying traditional logic. It also validated subjective expression by combining dreams and reality. We still use the tactics and strategies launched by this movement today. I really liked Meret Oppenheim and all the artists who have more recently dared, through their work, to talk about the body and the feminine mind. In our country, today, I would say it is Lyne Lapointe [qui est] the most adept in this approach. Humor accompanies compassion and makes us think differently. It is joy.”
“All art concerns me,” says Michael Merrill, “from cave paintings to the Renaissance, through Impressionism, Expressionism, Cubism, Surrealism, Abstraction, Realism… What’s interesting is how these major philosophical ideas mix. I went to New York to see the Manet and Velázquez show at the Met and I also saw Matthew Barney at the Guggenheim, all in the space of a few hours. The past and the present exist simultaneously.” As for his favorite surrealist artist, it’s “Picabia, the most mysterious.”
“I don’t have a favorite artist among those who were part of the movement,” says Dominic Papillon. “However, many of the artists who influenced me are those we could call protosurrealists. I’m thinking of the writers Isidore Lucien Ducasse and Maurice Blanchot, or the painter Hieronymus Bosch. The imagery that unfolds in their works is so strange. There’s something fascinating and refreshing when you find yourself faced with a reality that has no possible comparison.”