Encounter of Two Objects

One of Surrealism's aims as an emancipatory undertaking is to suspend the conventional identity of objects and 'purify' our approach to it. Paul Nash's contribution to British Surrealism was precisely to have raised the notion of 'encounter' to the level of a surrealist principle in Britain, working from found objects, the cornerstone of surrealist aesthetics, in which Breton had first seen the concrete precipitate of one's unconscious desires. Here as often during his surrealist years (roughly between 1935 and 1939), Nash is referring to stones found when walking in fields or on beaches, pebbles, flintstones, fossils, in other words traces of the prehistoric past of man, whose presence he emphasizes by enlarging or foregrounding them. During the process, the 'objects' acquire vaguely human shapes, here obviously masculine and feminine. Interestingly enough, this results in the blending of three main realms of man's relation to nature; indeed, these vestiges of the geological, mineral origins of life are given an animal quality, inseparable in turn from the 'intellectual', mental decision of the artist to 'stage' the encounter. Surrealism resides in this fictional reality which precipitates the immemorial past into our present times.

M. R.