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Lot Essay
Ana Vázquez de Parga has kindly confirmed the authenticity of this work.
Painted in 1938, at the height of Óscar Domínguez’s involvement with the Surrealist movement, Une mer céleste forms part of the artist’s acclaimed series of cosmic landscapes, which emerged as the result of his experiments with automatic processes of painting. According to Marcel Jean, these cosmic landscapes first appeared in Domínguez’s art as a result of creative chance. While drinking and chatting with friends in his studio one day, the artist let his paintbrush flow across the canvas in a series of uncalculated strokes, which resulted in beautifully curvilinear wave-like forms. Unmediated by Domínguez, this process corresponded to the Surrealist ideal of gesture-based automatism, which was advocated by Breton as a means of freeing the unconscious mind, liberating the rational self and allowing access to free expression. The cosmic views he painted as a result would prove incredibly influential on several of Domínguez’s fellow Surrealists, impacting the compositions of such artists as Roberto Matta, Gordon Onslow Ford and Esteban Francés. Domínguez had cemented his reputation within the group as a pioneering innovator earlier in the 1930s, following his development of the decalcomania technique and some of the first surrealist object-paintings.
Inspired by the forms which resulted from these experiments, Domínguez began to build his compositions around these marks, layering his colours in a series of subtle tonal shifts to achieve a sense of three-dimensionality and create an otherworldly, fantastical space. In Une mer céleste, the artist uses a subtle scale of blue-grey tones and free flowing brushstrokes to portray the meeting of the sea and land, as a number of monumental waves crash against the rugged, rocky coastline of an unspecified location. Emphasising the point where these two elemental forces meet, Domínguez’s painting creates a vision of an amorphous landscape, at once solid and liquid, stationary and flowing. This viscous, in-between nature of the rolling forms adds a fantastical quality to the landscape, transforming it into a dreamlike setting, whilst still retaining references to the volcanic terrain of the artist’s homeland of Tenerife. With its black sand beaches and stratified rock formations, the painting recalls the western coastline of the island, shaped by the daily pounding of the Atlantic Ocean into a series of dramatic cliff-faces, inlets and caves. The island’s topography had a lasting impact on Domínguez’s imagination, and would emerge repeatedly in paintings across his career.
Painted in 1938, at the height of Óscar Domínguez’s involvement with the Surrealist movement, Une mer céleste forms part of the artist’s acclaimed series of cosmic landscapes, which emerged as the result of his experiments with automatic processes of painting. According to Marcel Jean, these cosmic landscapes first appeared in Domínguez’s art as a result of creative chance. While drinking and chatting with friends in his studio one day, the artist let his paintbrush flow across the canvas in a series of uncalculated strokes, which resulted in beautifully curvilinear wave-like forms. Unmediated by Domínguez, this process corresponded to the Surrealist ideal of gesture-based automatism, which was advocated by Breton as a means of freeing the unconscious mind, liberating the rational self and allowing access to free expression. The cosmic views he painted as a result would prove incredibly influential on several of Domínguez’s fellow Surrealists, impacting the compositions of such artists as Roberto Matta, Gordon Onslow Ford and Esteban Francés. Domínguez had cemented his reputation within the group as a pioneering innovator earlier in the 1930s, following his development of the decalcomania technique and some of the first surrealist object-paintings.
Inspired by the forms which resulted from these experiments, Domínguez began to build his compositions around these marks, layering his colours in a series of subtle tonal shifts to achieve a sense of three-dimensionality and create an otherworldly, fantastical space. In Une mer céleste, the artist uses a subtle scale of blue-grey tones and free flowing brushstrokes to portray the meeting of the sea and land, as a number of monumental waves crash against the rugged, rocky coastline of an unspecified location. Emphasising the point where these two elemental forces meet, Domínguez’s painting creates a vision of an amorphous landscape, at once solid and liquid, stationary and flowing. This viscous, in-between nature of the rolling forms adds a fantastical quality to the landscape, transforming it into a dreamlike setting, whilst still retaining references to the volcanic terrain of the artist’s homeland of Tenerife. With its black sand beaches and stratified rock formations, the painting recalls the western coastline of the island, shaped by the daily pounding of the Atlantic Ocean into a series of dramatic cliff-faces, inlets and caves. The island’s topography had a lasting impact on Domínguez’s imagination, and would emerge repeatedly in paintings across his career.