Composición surrealista

Painted in 1937, Composición Surrealista is a recently rediscovered work from the height of Oscar Domínguez’s involvement with the Surrealists, created during a period in which he made significant contributions to the movement and produced some of his most daring, enigmatic works. Though he had been living in Paris for several years and working in a Surrealist vein since 1929, it was not until 1934 that Domínguez became personally acquainted with André Breton and the circle of artists, poets and writers that surrounded him. Attracted to the inventiveness of Domínguez’s enigmatic imagery, infused with memories, colours and forms from his native Tenerife, the Surrealists quickly embraced the young Spaniard, incorporating several of his works in some of their most important early exhibitions: in 1935 he was instrumental in organising a Surrealist exhibition at the Ateneo in Santa Cruz de Tenerife; in 1936 he participated in the International Surrealist Exhibition organised in London by Roland Penrose and, at the beginning of 1938, he contributed to the seminal Exposition Internationale du Surréalisme at the Galerie des Beaux-Arts in Paris.

Domínguez rapidly became a key player in the movement, one of an important new generation of artists that Breton believed would revitalise Surrealism. Nicknamed ‘le Dragonnier des Canaries’ by his new acquaintances, he cut a powerful figure within the group, not least following his development of the automatic painting technique known as decalcomania. Domínguez in turn, threw himself into the movement, engaging enthusiastically in their discussions and debates. Many of the paintings he produced during this period contain clear echoes of key surrealist concepts and ideas, most notably Machine à coudre électro-sexuelle, which appears to be a twisted re-imagining of the celebrated phrase, ‘Beautiful as the chance encounter of a sewing machine and an umbrella on a dissecting table,’ which had become something of a mantra for the movement. In Composición Surrealista, the artist creates an otherworldly scene that perfectly blends the potent dream imagery of Domínguez’s figurative works with a suggestive, spontaneous automatism that would fuel his artistic development through the rest of the decade.

Here, the artist depicts a bare rocky landscape, its dark soil reminiscent of the artist’s homeland of Tenerife, from which a fantastical biomorphic mass blooms. While Domínguez often included man-made elements in his compositions, such as steam rollers, pistols and sardine cans, here the imagery appears to be exclusively organic. Amorphous forms in shades of blue and pink stretch outwards in great flowing tendrils, their edges marked by spiky structures reminiscent of cacti, vines and leaves. At the base of the swirling mass the lower half of a female nude is just visible as it perches atop a rock, legs crossed and apparently wrapped in a flowing white sheet, lending the scene an enigmatic sensuality and eroticism that is characteristic of Domínguez’s work at this time. The ambiguous, fluid cloud of colour appears to spring from this woman’s torso, as if she herself is dissolving into the landscape, imbuing the nebulous form above with suggestions of a humanoid hybridity. Indeed, the soft, shadowy elements that line the edges of the cloud suddenly appear to echo hair, while two cerulean orbs at the centre can be read as a pair of large blue eyes surrounded by long lashes, gazing out over the scene.

While the dream-like quality of the composition, and in particular the fluid body of the female figure, suggests the influence of Salvador Dalí’s work on the artist, it is in the shifting sense of materiality and space that Composición Surrealista captures Domínguez’s train of thought at this time, as he began to explore a new path that would lead to the development of his acclaimed cosmic landscapes the following year. Filled with a fluid sense of motion that suggests continual evolution and transformation, the forms in the composition appear as if they may morph into another formation at any moment, or slip away entirely into the ether.