.jpg?w=1)
Lot Essay
In 1951, the San Francisco Museum of Art introduced DYNATON as an exhibition with "significance for our time." Lee Mullican, Gordon Onslow-Ford, and Wolfgang Paalen were the three artists that had formed in the Bay Area, in 1948, the art movement that Paalen would not allow to be referred to as such. Paalen, its theoretician, as well as the soul of the group, refused to have it labeled as another "ism." He wanted it to stand on its own, separate and apart, as a state of mind arisen from the messages gathered from the art created in the New World and in Indo-America. Long before joining the ranks of the Surrealist Movement (1936), Paalen had sought ways to be attuned to information imbued in ancient art attempting to create a contemporary art that would give visual credence to the instinctual world. Thus, creating a new art that would transform the artist while simultaneously establishing a bridge between inner and outer reality. He wanted to produce an art as direct as the image that informed our minds pre-verbally, long before we developed a glyph to describe it. Paalen explained it as a "presupposed mental image of the desired shape" like primordial energy that can be sensed prior to becoming formative. It would serve as vehicle to create meaningful abstractions that would impact the viewer as music impacts the listener. When Paalen arrived in America, shortly before World War II, he had the intention of exploring his budding intuitions in-situ. Initially he traveled extensively in the Northwest of the American continent and settling in Mexico, he studied pre-Hispanic art and edited DYN (from the Greek meaning 'the possible'), the art journal that included the seeds of his developing theories of DYNATON, which also influenced the thinking of the artists of the developing New York School of Painting.
Message belongs to the series of works which Paalen chose for inclusion in the San Francisco Museum of Art exhibition. It is interesting how the image has been re-read over the years until some have referred to it as The Messenger. This re-interpretation of the work in a way validates Paalen's theory about producing an image instinctually, without preconceived ideas, an image that does not have a source, or a root, or is related to anything created before... something that has a meaning of its own despite appearing as something else. It is likely that those who have renamed the work have done it attempting to anthropomorphize the vertical form in the center. It would be a reading to reassure, rather than the original one, which, because of its ambiguity, might disturb.
For the catalogue of Homenaje a Wolfgang Paalen el precursor, in Mexico City's Museo de Arte Moderno, Gordon Onslow-Ford wrote about Paalen and his work, linking both to Breton's "The Great Transparent," personages that inhabit the same space that we do but with a different frequency that would make them invisible to us. Onslow-Ford wonders whether Paalen may have been the first who saw one of the "Great Transparent." He wrote that Paalen "is so interwoven with his personages that he himself seems to me like a Messenger who, like his parables came from far away, lived with us for a short time and afterwards went on his way... Once his best paintings can be seen together and his writings, edited and unedited, are studied, surely one message will be seen."
Salomon Grimberg
Dallas, April 2005
Message belongs to the series of works which Paalen chose for inclusion in the San Francisco Museum of Art exhibition. It is interesting how the image has been re-read over the years until some have referred to it as The Messenger. This re-interpretation of the work in a way validates Paalen's theory about producing an image instinctually, without preconceived ideas, an image that does not have a source, or a root, or is related to anything created before... something that has a meaning of its own despite appearing as something else. It is likely that those who have renamed the work have done it attempting to anthropomorphize the vertical form in the center. It would be a reading to reassure, rather than the original one, which, because of its ambiguity, might disturb.
For the catalogue of Homenaje a Wolfgang Paalen el precursor, in Mexico City's Museo de Arte Moderno, Gordon Onslow-Ford wrote about Paalen and his work, linking both to Breton's "The Great Transparent," personages that inhabit the same space that we do but with a different frequency that would make them invisible to us. Onslow-Ford wonders whether Paalen may have been the first who saw one of the "Great Transparent." He wrote that Paalen "is so interwoven with his personages that he himself seems to me like a Messenger who, like his parables came from far away, lived with us for a short time and afterwards went on his way... Once his best paintings can be seen together and his writings, edited and unedited, are studied, surely one message will be seen."
Salomon Grimberg
Dallas, April 2005