.jpg?w=1)
Lot Essay
Domínguez is credited as the inventor and great pioneer of the objet surréaliste, which he introduced only the year after he was embraced by the Surrealists in Paris. Dating from circa 1936, the period of the inception of the Surrealist Object, Caja con piano y toro (tableau objet) combines found objects with painting. With the scenes of pianos set within a paint-box, it appears to be a strange, Surreal and personal reflection on the processes of artistic creativity.
In this work, a narrative tableau is formed by the juxtaposition of the painted piano with a bull walking away from us, and the objects below where a model piano is being rammed by a small model bull. In the mirage-like painted section, there are hints of automatism in the painting, with forms bleeding into one another, a tree into the piano into a wheel and a yoke. It appears that the ox leaving the scene is dragging some bizarre assemblage, an impossible tinker's cart. There is a clear link between these two scenes, made more explicit by the form that begins as a sheet attached to the painted piano and trickles down to form the pool in which the second stands. But the nature of the link remains deliberately obscure. Is one scene before, one after? Are these parallel scenes? Are they linked only by the chance slip of a brush in the artist's hand, developed into a new image, or perhaps by a subconscious theme of Domínguez' own? There is no logic by the rules of the conscious world. Instead, Caja con piano y toro (tableau objet) presents us with an enigma, a tableau that dips into a Surreal universe of mystery.
The mystery is made all the more potent by the deliberate blurring of boundaries involved in Caja con piano y toro (tableau objet). The boundaries between the senses are muddied in part through the invocation of music in the pianos. Meanwhile, the represented world of the painting, the formal border that is formed by the two-dimensional support of a picture, is here blurred by its strange liquid-like link to a scene shown 'in the round'. Like some strange looking glass from the mind of Lewis Carroll, this work straddles the still and represented world of paint and the object-filled world of the viewer. Avoiding the reassuring simplicity of a frame to delineate the beginning of the artwork and the end of our universe, Caja con piano y toro (tableau objet) is an invitation, beckoning us into Domínguez' world of dreams and illusions. In an ultimate twist of mystery the present work seems to be prefigured in the open red box that Dominguez painted in the foreground of Le lion du désert (see lot 104).
In this work, a narrative tableau is formed by the juxtaposition of the painted piano with a bull walking away from us, and the objects below where a model piano is being rammed by a small model bull. In the mirage-like painted section, there are hints of automatism in the painting, with forms bleeding into one another, a tree into the piano into a wheel and a yoke. It appears that the ox leaving the scene is dragging some bizarre assemblage, an impossible tinker's cart. There is a clear link between these two scenes, made more explicit by the form that begins as a sheet attached to the painted piano and trickles down to form the pool in which the second stands. But the nature of the link remains deliberately obscure. Is one scene before, one after? Are these parallel scenes? Are they linked only by the chance slip of a brush in the artist's hand, developed into a new image, or perhaps by a subconscious theme of Domínguez' own? There is no logic by the rules of the conscious world. Instead, Caja con piano y toro (tableau objet) presents us with an enigma, a tableau that dips into a Surreal universe of mystery.
The mystery is made all the more potent by the deliberate blurring of boundaries involved in Caja con piano y toro (tableau objet). The boundaries between the senses are muddied in part through the invocation of music in the pianos. Meanwhile, the represented world of the painting, the formal border that is formed by the two-dimensional support of a picture, is here blurred by its strange liquid-like link to a scene shown 'in the round'. Like some strange looking glass from the mind of Lewis Carroll, this work straddles the still and represented world of paint and the object-filled world of the viewer. Avoiding the reassuring simplicity of a frame to delineate the beginning of the artwork and the end of our universe, Caja con piano y toro (tableau objet) is an invitation, beckoning us into Domínguez' world of dreams and illusions. In an ultimate twist of mystery the present work seems to be prefigured in the open red box that Dominguez painted in the foreground of Le lion du désert (see lot 104).