English
With photographic and audiovisual works of surrealist artists as Manray, Boiffard, Painlevé, Tabard and Bresson, the curators and Clément Quentin Bajac Cheroux, present the exhibition “The Subversion of Images” in the MAPFRE Foundation
This exhibition, with over 300 photographs, 100 documents and about 10 films organized into nine sections, attempts to address the processes of research and experimentation that made the surrealist movement through photography, film and all possible variants of visual work.
The surrealist movement was determined to change life through art and to achieve the indissoluble union of art and life. That is why its experimentation crossed all levels of life to discover the “ beyond”.
This need to transform the look, to contemplate the environment and the point of view from which we observe revolutionized the possibilities of the image.
The first section of the exhibition entitled “Collective Action” and it presents the surrealist movement as such, and as first the collective over the individual. Hence the display of collective writings, manifestos, exquisite corpses, collage and multiple photographic images of the group.
Secondly we find the “Theater of the unreason” that shows how the theatricality, which shows how drama, a pillar of the aesthetics of surrealism, applied to photography.
“The real, accidental, how wonderful,” is the section which deals with the street. Windows, mannequins, deserted streets at night become subject to portrayals of the hidden or secret.
“The mounting board” brings together images, photographs, clippings or postcards collages, photomontages and exquisite corpses that were published regularly in magazines of the time.
The tension generated between what we see and its reality or the surreal look of reality features in the sixth section “scopic drive.”
In the seventh section, a favorite of the Surrealists, “Automatic Writing” is the star. Here spontaneous and unconscious activity directly relates the idea of automation with the idea of taking photographs. Breton called automatic writing “picture thinking” and introduced the extreme idea of chance. There are even photo frames created by the direct footprint of light with no chemical processing.
In the penultimate section, “Anatomy of the image,” the photographic works are subjected to different processes of developing and creating photographic techniques such as brûlage, solarization, deformation or reversal of tonal values.
The exhibition closes with the section “Of the good use of surrealism” which shows the use of techniques pioneered by the Surrealists in the world of fashion and advertising.
“Subversion of images is a good reflection of the desires, goals and experiences of the Surrealists. Enjoy these apartments in Madrid before September 12, and don´t miss out on this surreal romp.
