.jpg?w=1)
Lot Essay
In Personajes Surrealistas, painted in 1938, an intricate web of emblems and imagery sweeps across the canvas. Elements intertwine and interlink in a mysterious dance that introduces a new understanding of reality. The emanations of Domínguez' complex subconscious are here presented on an epic scale, their arcane associations captured in oils yet remaining elusive, hovering tantalisingly beyond the grasp of the viewer. Poetic echoes reverberate through the various elements, creating a strange and hieratic web of relationships: the clouds are pinned to the ground in a reprisal of the pinned materials that form the bulk of the Personajes themselves; the outline of the piano appears again and again, both explicitly and discreetly; animals and machinery blend into the quasi-human figures, the front of a lion here, a dragonfly there. The swathes of material that form the figures and the clouds bleed into the landscape, itself reminiscent of Domínguez' native Tenerife, while from the landscape itself, in the far right-hand portion of the painting, the features of a human face appear to be emerging.
This rich world of associations reveals Domínguez at the highpoint of his involvement with the Surrealists. This was the year of the famous Exposition Internationale du Surréalisme, in which Domínguez contributed. Amongst his contributions was the mannequin he provided, which itself had features echoing those in Personajes Surrealistas, not least a flow of material which in this case sprung from a siphon. In Domínguez' mannequin, the dummy was conspicuously naked, an object of desire, and this desire was itself linked to the siphon (consumption) and to machinery. In Personajes Surrealistas, these same issues appear in the forms of the bicycle and what appears to be a dentist's chair, metallic elements that add a sense of science, modernity, but also of trauma, while the apples that form the head and breast of the left-hand figure expressly link the artist's appetites both for food and sex and, perhaps obliquely and through the Bible, to sin itself. At the same time, the fragmented bone-like relics at the right-hand side near the sardine-can lid appear to be the remains of some savage, alien feast, the vestige of a sating of an animal and extreme appetite.
There is little violence in Personajes Surrealistas, despite the strange and disturbing transformations through which the world we know has been dragged, yet there are elements nonetheless that hint at the conflict that filled the artist's life, both in personal terms and on the larger scale of the Spanish Civil War which was raging when the picture was painted. This is best exemplified in a poetic element that appeared even before the war broke out, the bull ramming the grand piano. On the one hand, this appears to encapsulate the artist's own anxieties about his clumsiness and about the fragile nature of his art, yet on the other hand has now become an anxiety-filled image of the rudderless rampage of Spain, the spectral bull destroying culture and beauty. Violence was a recurring motif in Domínguez' art, as it was in his turbulent life, and it is therefore apt to find that it saturates Personajes Surrealistas to such an extent.
This rich world of associations reveals Domínguez at the highpoint of his involvement with the Surrealists. This was the year of the famous Exposition Internationale du Surréalisme, in which Domínguez contributed. Amongst his contributions was the mannequin he provided, which itself had features echoing those in Personajes Surrealistas, not least a flow of material which in this case sprung from a siphon. In Domínguez' mannequin, the dummy was conspicuously naked, an object of desire, and this desire was itself linked to the siphon (consumption) and to machinery. In Personajes Surrealistas, these same issues appear in the forms of the bicycle and what appears to be a dentist's chair, metallic elements that add a sense of science, modernity, but also of trauma, while the apples that form the head and breast of the left-hand figure expressly link the artist's appetites both for food and sex and, perhaps obliquely and through the Bible, to sin itself. At the same time, the fragmented bone-like relics at the right-hand side near the sardine-can lid appear to be the remains of some savage, alien feast, the vestige of a sating of an animal and extreme appetite.
There is little violence in Personajes Surrealistas, despite the strange and disturbing transformations through which the world we know has been dragged, yet there are elements nonetheless that hint at the conflict that filled the artist's life, both in personal terms and on the larger scale of the Spanish Civil War which was raging when the picture was painted. This is best exemplified in a poetic element that appeared even before the war broke out, the bull ramming the grand piano. On the one hand, this appears to encapsulate the artist's own anxieties about his clumsiness and about the fragile nature of his art, yet on the other hand has now become an anxiety-filled image of the rudderless rampage of Spain, the spectral bull destroying culture and beauty. Violence was a recurring motif in Domínguez' art, as it was in his turbulent life, and it is therefore apt to find that it saturates Personajes Surrealistas to such an extent.