The 1970s claimed it was out of breath, dated, put on the shelf of starched oldies. Nearly a hundred years after its advent in 1924, surrealism resembles a perpetually reinterpreted dream. The Rouen Museum of Fine Arts revives the brief passion between its inventor, the poet André Breton, and a young passer-by, Nadja, whom he raised to the rank of literary myth.
At the LaM, in Villeneuve-d’Ascq, the exhibition “Searching for the gold of time” opens on October 14, subtitled “Surrealism, natural art, raw art, magic art”. In Venice too, this movement which explored the depths of the unconscious is in majesty. Cecilia Alemani, curator of the Biennial of Contemporary Art, devotes an entire room to her, while the Peggy Guggenheim Collection also dissects her interest in magic.
subvert reality
For ten years already, exhibitions have multiplied around the movement so popular with the general public that the word has passed into everyday language to define everything that is deemed incongruous, delusional or absurd. “Surreal”, writes AFP to qualify the telephone exchange between Putin and Macron, on February 20, just before the invasion of Ukraine by Russia. “Surreal”, again, is the sum offered by Real Madrid to footballer Kylian Mbappé.
Annexed – and misguided – by everyday vocabulary, surrealism has been absorbed by popular culture, fashion, cinema and advertising. “What do René Magritte and David Lynch have in common? More than you think, headlined the site in 2016 The Observer, the weekly British newspaper The Guardian. Same poetic flashes that burst the canvas and the screen. Same disturbing strangeness, same dream of macabre love.
It is again Magritte that the leather goods manufacturer Delvaux appropriates, for a line of accessories featuring his famous bowler hat and his fluffy clouds. Magritte whose spirit hovers over Dior’s haute couture show in 2018, like a call to escape the dull routine.
“In Venice, artists imagine that bodies and identities can be reinvented to arrive at new bodies of desire. » Cecilia Alemani, curator of the Biennale
“ Surrealism is in the air, it’s undeniable », smiles Cecilia Alemani, returned to contemporary art through her readings of writers like Bataille. Throughout the two years spent discussing by videoconference with the artists approached for her biennial, the Italian curator found in them everything that, years earlier, fascinated her in the followers of André Breton. First of all, the metamorphosis of bodies and the erotic imagination, the same desire to subvert reality, a taste for insubordination. “ At the Biennial, she continuesmany artists imagine that bodies and identities can be reinvented to arrive at new bodies of desire. »
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