“Beautiful Bizarre” at Daphne Arts Gallery, surrealist beauty of an uncertain and confused era

Windlight Art Critic & gallery Reviewer, Oema, is back with a review of the new exhibition at Daphne Arts Gallery:

By always the art is an expression more showy of the epoch of reference. The Surrealist movement was and is particularly suited to the moments of great transition and confusion, as our one at this time.

It is during the First World War that takes life the surrealist movement. This event so cruel and bloody, which brought the soldiers and the population to exasperation, impelled the Surrealist group to assume a revolutionary attitude toward reality.

The founder of the surrealist movement is the poet Andre Breton, which begins to develop his ideas precisely during the Great War. He enrolled in the Faculty of Medicine, although interested in humanistic studies and in particular poetry. In fact already in 1914 will be able to publish its first poems on the magazine “La Phalange“. At the outbreak of the war is called to enlist, but manages to get away from the front and is transferred to the neurological center of Nantes, where is auxiliary medical.

Later in 1916 under its request is transferred to the psychiatric hospital of Saint Dizier, where they were welcomed soldiers who had gone mad because of the war and prisoners waiting to be processed. The people with whom he came in contact Breton were soldiers who for a long time had lived heaped in the trenches continuously under the shooting of enemy artillery. When they began to show signs of mental unbalance were brought in asylums and here he was diagnosed with a new type of mental illness, the shock from combat. Unprepared, the doctors tried to cure the soldiers with sessions of electroshock, which looked more like the torture.

While in hospitals Breton began to show his interest for the psychiatric patients and the corners more obscure of the human mind. And it is in this environment that is born the future concept of surrealism.

“The time spent in that place and the attention with which I was studying what was happening, they have counted immensely in my life and have certainly had decisive influence on my way of thinking.” (A. Breton – Gallimard, 1952).

Breton reads the writings of Freud and applies the psycho-analytic theories on the sick and also on writing. In 1919 together with Soupault processes the automatic writing, through which the thought is freed from the control of reason and reveals the unconscious dimension. That part of the human mind which would otherwise would catch only in the dream, and thus becomes active even in the state of vigil, showing the real operation of thought.

No brakes moral inhibitors or aesthetic, the Thought Flows free and reaches the surrealism, a higher reality and absolute where dream and vigil interpenetrate. The Surrealism is then defined by the same Breton:

“Surrealism, N.m. Automatism pure psychic with which we propose to express both verbally and in writing or in any other way, the real operation of thought. The wording of the thought, in the absence of any control exercised by reason, outside of every concern aesthetics or moral” .

The liberation from c.d. Super-I, rational censor of our feeling and doing, leads, the artistic, to the surrealist representation that, by force of circumstances, is confused.

A typical disorder of Dream, where our feeling is truly free, without rational constraints of any kind.

An expression of Surrealism very interesting is the exhibition “Beautiful Bizarre” hosted by DaphneArts Gallery precisely in these days.

The artists surrealists who are exposing are around 13, here are their names: Angelika Corral, Asa Vordun, Gwenarielle, Leeleu  Lemondrop,  Loki (LokiSilverson), Maghda, Paradox Messmer, Rainbow Mubble, Sabbian Paine, SheldonBR, terrygold, Theda Tammas.

The characteristic of their work is that it is, as regards the 12 photographers exponents, Photo shots taken in 3D environment of S.Life and for the 3D artist of a creation realized by modeling software outside the environment of S.Life and then imported.

By reading the presentation of the curators Angelika Corral and SheldonBr, you understand the meaning of the title of the exhibition. The beauty as subjective concept, released by the aesthetic canons fixed and defined. The beauty, I would say, as a synonym of freedom of expression is typical of the Surrealist environment that gives voice to the emotions interiors accepting them  for what they are, without a moral censure, aesthetics or religious. The beauty of chaos, “represent what I feel.”

Some of the works exhibited remind me of the style of Magritte, where objects are symbols that have the purpose to communicate, to transmit to the observer a message, sometimes, disconcert it.

I very much appreciate the complex work behind the scenes of this extraordinary surrealist representation and I hope in the future to be able to still admire an exposure so heterogeneous in number of artists and at the same time homogeneous in style proposed.