Le surréalisme dans tous ses états
The following is a translation of a French article Le surréalisme dans tous ses états by Névine Lameï, Mercredi, 23 février 2022
Surrealism in all its forms
Névine Lameï, Mercredi, 23 février 2022
An international exhibition on surrealism is being held until March 2 in Egypt. And its second part is supposed to take place in Saint-Cirq-Lapopie, France. Guided tour with Clément Gaesler, French curator of the exhibition, given at the Kodak Passage.
La Donna Smith on violin, during the opening. (Photo: Nvine Lame)
The kodak passage space, with its panoramic windows overlooking Adli Street, in downtown Cairo, hosts an international exhibition on surrealism, exhibiting paintings, collages and drawings. “The works of 150 artists, from 28 countries, are divided into groups. Each country has its own pavilion and creative wall. Everything is based on the exploration of the functioning of thought, desire, chance, madness, sleep, hypnosis, humor, hybridization, fantasy, carnal love. and the banality of reality,” explains Clément Gaesler, curator of the exhibition and conservation attaché at the André Breton house.
Gaesler launches the visit by starting with the Maison André Breton, the French pavilion, the most poetic of the exhibition, bringing together 40 surrealist works, in small formats, at the entrance to the Kodak Passage.
We approach the drawings of Alain Pillard, with his mysterious shadows, his carnivalesque silhouettes, his pseudo-magical and iconic images diverted into funny things, with his fantastic little tribes. “Pillard’s art frees itself from the old humanist prejudice that subjugates man to the center of the Universe. And this, by revisiting an animal, fantastic and primitive mythology of human societies”, underlines Gaesler. Eccentric and wacky, Prillard apprehends, through language and image, a form of mental revolution, in a kind of “humorous and seditious investigation”. It’s like the recreation of a myth or even a departure into the unknown.
As for Olivier Orus, he takes us into a more luminous, blurred and diaphanous world, with his ink drawings. “The universe of Orus, with pulsating sensations and subtle bodies, with formal vocabulary and concretized vagueness, advocates the matching of heterogeneous objects, in interaction with the dream, with the unconscious, with the impalpable” , indicates Gaesler, who reviews, thereafter, the work of Lou Dubois, this poet in words and images, exposing games of collage of intertextuality and resemblance, very tasty. “I am passionate about this 19th century aristocratic character painted with great dreamlikeness by Lou Duboi, in the spirit of a traveler-thinker beyond a metapsychic and kaleidoscopic, heterogeneous and erotic universe. The artist reuses old boxes from entomologists and naturalized specimens (morpho butterfly, elephant tail, primate skull, etc.), specifies the curator of the exhibition.
The French pavilion is equipped with a small table, with reference books on surrealism. “We offer the visitor all the possibilities to dive into the world of surrealism, a world more dreamlike than logical, made of hallucination than reality, which allows the unconscious to imagine, dream and express itself. against the established order and social conventions,” he adds.
On the right of the large exhibition hall hang the works of the British group La Sirena, dealing with the question of gender, differences and otherness. “How can we think of our identities today through the prism of questions of hybridization, desire, freedom, evolution? The mermaid, this hybrid being, was chosen to be at the center of the surrealist adventures of the group of artists, who investigate themselves in the light of the conceptualists: found object and objective chance,” says Gaesler.
With Gaesler, we take a momentary break to savor a surreal piece played on the violin by the American La Donna Smith, then we move on to a physical theater performance, Najda in Cairo, based on an autobiographical story by André Breton. And this, on the occasion of the opening which took place on February 15, between 6 p.m. and 9 p.m.
In the age of the digital revolution
The visit resumes with Gaesler. Now it is the turn of the Egyptian surrealist group, representing the Middle East and North Africa. We then discover the work of Mohsen ElBelasy, editor-in-chief of online surrealist magazines: The Room, La Belle Inutile Editions and the Sulfur Surrealist Jungle.
ElBelasy develops a new Egyptian surrealism, linked to technological transformations, to digital, with collage games, transparent backgrounds and moving ghost images. Images inspired by the surrealist authenticity of Dali. “Mohsen ElBelasy is an excellent webmaster. It was he who created a manifesto of the digital field, through which he contacted all the surrealist groups around the world to meet in Cairo”, appreciates Gaesler. And to add: “Personally, I find that the Egyptian group as a whole dares to do avant-garde things that awaken our repressed impulses in a chaotic way, like Cairo and its mutations”.
The works of the Egyptian group are hung one above the other, thus mixing eras, times, the true, the false, the real and the surreal. ElBelasy’s wife, Ghadah Kamal, exhibits her work The Funeral of the Elephant on the same wall. “I go beyond the limits of reason with giant animal creatures, opposed to miniatures”, explains the artist.
The young Fairouz Al-Taweela, for her part, lends herself to a very colorful and very childish surrealist game, between the lost and the broken. His world of toys, arranged in disorder, piques the eye. And to end the visit in style, Gaesler approaches the four large-format surrealist paintings by the American Abdullah Ali Butler. “Butler is rather oriented towards a childish aesthetic sensibility, which has a naive and fantastical dimension, reminiscent of the surrealism, of the Mexican Leonora Carrington, with its magical world of ironic sorcery, fantasized ball, animals gifted with words, wacky hybrids, strange and deformed creatures, culinary alchemy and dreamlike universe”, concludes the curator of the exhibition. This international event on surrealism takes place until March, in several places in Cairo, including the Kodak Passage, but also the Lamassat gallery, still in the city center. An opportunity to share thoughts outside the codes, drawing from the depths of the human.