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Lot Essay
Painted in 1946, Les Silencieux I demonstrates Paalen’s powerful ability to distil the devastation of war into a vision of poetic transcendence. Invited by Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera, Paalen settled in Mexico in 1939, where the present work was executed. In the preceding years, he had travelled extensively along the northwest coast of North America, during which time he encountered Amerindian art, whose iconography can be seen so clearly in this work and others from the period. The visual language of this artistic tradition provided Paalen with a means of exploring the psychological and existential questions that lay at the heart of his practice, particularly those prompted by the recently concluded Second World War.
Paalen’s works of the war and immediate post-war years represent an effort to synthesise the microcosm and the macrocosm, what Gustav Regler described in his book of the same year as “a magnetic field of emotion” (G. Regler, Wolfgang Paalen, New York, 1946.) In Les Silencieux I, this dynamic interplay between the individual and the vastness of the cosmos is vividly depicted. Abstract constellations assume humanoid forms, evoking faces and bodies suspended within an inscrutable grey void.
The painting was created shortly after Paalen’s decisive break from the philosophy of André Breton and the Surrealist movement, which he had embraced so wholeheartedly only a few years earlier. Increasingly, he sought to address questions such as, “What is right with science and why does it work?” and “What is wrong with art in our time and why does it not work?”. At the heart of this inquiry was a profound desire to better understand the nature of creative imagination. In articulating his new ideas, Paalen shines a light on what we see in this work, “I do not imitate your eyes, the picture says, but I am your dreamy look. Do you recognize me? Tomorrow I may belong to someone else” (ibid).
Paalen’s works of the war and immediate post-war years represent an effort to synthesise the microcosm and the macrocosm, what Gustav Regler described in his book of the same year as “a magnetic field of emotion” (G. Regler, Wolfgang Paalen, New York, 1946.) In Les Silencieux I, this dynamic interplay between the individual and the vastness of the cosmos is vividly depicted. Abstract constellations assume humanoid forms, evoking faces and bodies suspended within an inscrutable grey void.
The painting was created shortly after Paalen’s decisive break from the philosophy of André Breton and the Surrealist movement, which he had embraced so wholeheartedly only a few years earlier. Increasingly, he sought to address questions such as, “What is right with science and why does it work?” and “What is wrong with art in our time and why does it not work?”. At the heart of this inquiry was a profound desire to better understand the nature of creative imagination. In articulating his new ideas, Paalen shines a light on what we see in this work, “I do not imitate your eyes, the picture says, but I am your dreamy look. Do you recognize me? Tomorrow I may belong to someone else” (ibid).