For the past few years, the Gallery Malingue has chosen to explore successively, the seductive, dreamlike world of several Surrealist artists (Tanguy, Ernst, Matta) ; then a visual adventure at the heart of the Grands Surréalistes was shown the public.
For this fall exhibition, Victor Brauner, another essential character in the French Surrealist scene (and yet whose last exhibition in a Parisian museum dates back to 1996, in the Musée national d'Art moderne), a prolific and enigmatic artist, is showcased: a group of over thirty works provides an overview of his creativity. The need to pinpoint the brilliant diversity and vivaciousness of his oeuvre led us to set up a rediscovery of this major figure.
This subtle painter's career, with a violently unbridled imagination, started in the orbit of the vanguard artistic milieus in Bucharest during the twenties. He settled in Paris in 1930; where his sometimes troubling work, providing an original approach to the world, immediately seduced the Surrealists who instantly welcomed him into their group. Several works in the exhibition illustrate his research during the early Parisian years (Prophétie, L'Eclair questionne…).
An emblematic series from that time is the ensemble setting forth the imaginary character "Monsieur K.", an obese and mustachioed figure, a banker-policeman taken from Kafka and Jarry. His absurd and esoteric "metamorphoses" were multiplied with brio in the Morphologie de l'Homme, from 1934, a major and little-known work in the series.
During the night of August 27 to 28, 1938, in Oscar Dominguez's studio, during a fight between him and his compatriot Esteban Frances, Victor Brauner lost his left eye. The images of ocular mutilation previously carried out then appeared as premonitory : Brauner felt himself invested with outstanding powers, capable of capturing secret messages, of setting off changes on the intimate or cosmic plane. For him, that accident became a sign of an initiatory access to another visibility, magical and mysterious.
For Brauner, the war years were those of a forced entrenchment in the South of France. But his strength and his creative forces were in no way diminished, only held back through the lack of means. Several works on paper illustrate the production of those difficult years, including the magnificent watercolor Lion Lumière Liberté (on loan from the Musées nationaux) and the amazing Enterrez vos armes (one of the very few oils from that period).
Back in Paris, after the war, Victor Brauner never ceased to experiment, carried forward by "revelations" that led to a multiple and always surprising body of work. Thus La Rencontre du 2 bis rue Perrel, 1946 (lent by the Musée d'Art moderne de la Ville de Paris) is proof of the curious coincidence that led him to settle in the very same building as the one where Douanier Rousseau had lived.
With this innovator, fascinated by occultism, words were always important : "the artist is a proclaimer", Brauner maintained, careful to produce alongside each work a truth emphasized by the words of the title (Poète en exil, 1946), often made up (Fantassin spermésthésique, 1949). His freedom and the wealth of his invention, turned his studio into a sort of "alchemical forge of modern art".
The Braunerian characters (Le Boyard, 1958, Stéréofigure, 1959 (lent by the Musée d'Art moderne de la Ville de Paris), Extrait du Radiant symbolique, 1962) were the "Golems" of new times: the humor is gritty, poetry circulates within and drama is not far off. From inner conflicts there come forth those characters (Fruit nouveau, 1964, lent by the Musées nationaux).
The legacy series of that rich and disturbing work, nourished with esotericism and with psycho-analytical knowledge, is illustrated in the exhibition : a work from the magnificent series Mythologie, (preserved in the Musée de l'Abbaye Sainte Croix, Les Sables d'Olonne) is displayed. That ensemble, combined with the series La Fête des Mères, is a suite of 14 works. Each painting is enclosed inside a painted wood frame, devised according to an evocative shape, frequently zoomorphic. Joyously deformed words make up the titles of those canvases filled with humor and fantasy, combining the artist's biography with his intellectual encounters (alchemy, psycho-analysis, the new stakes of modernity, etc…).
With this exhibition, and in this year that celebrates Daniel Malingue's fifty years' activity, the Malingue gallery, is happy to contribute to the better knowledge of the rich and enigmatic œuvre of that "illuminator" who was Victor Brauner, who embodies most closely the spirit of the Surrealist movement in the light of its most varied facets, and in all its complexity.
Translated in English by Ann Cremin
ANTHOLOGY
"Now, six and a half years have gone by since I lost my left eye. That mutilation is as present within me as on the very first day, representing the most painful and the most important fact that ever happened to me.
Through time and events, it makes up the basic key of my vital development.
Through time going through time, that unparalled example in art history, will later on inevitably be known and commented upon as a unique and extraordinary fact.
That is why, in my painting I bear that physical mark, and for that reason and other misunderstood ones, the obsessive necessity of the reconstitution of all the factors linked with that huge cyclopean breach in my body, up till then without the slightest physical deformation, little by little leading to the dissolution of my physical being, in parallel with the great generalized dissolution all around me."
Victor Brauner
"My paintings are autobiographical. There I relate my life. My life is exemplary because it is universal… It also relates primitive dreams in their form and in their times….
… My painting is also symbolical and each time it is a message, not a metaphysical message, but a direct and poetic message.
[…] Everything is personified through a shape, each shape is personified by a thing. Thus, in my paintings you will never see where the things are, for things are concrete within their totality and they themselves express space.
Victor Brauner
"In Brauner, imagination is violently set free; it burns and twists all the paths through which Surrealism itself is sometimes tempted to make it travel, with a view to systematic ends, admissible in fact. The great nighttime and immemorial stewpot thunders in the distance and at every stroke of the gong sounded - it is its lid which is beating - there slips through the slit, all kinds of doubtful beings and objects, which spread throughout the mental landscape."
André Breton, "Botte rose blanche", in Victor Brauner, Paris, Galerie Pierre, December 1934
"Victor Brauner is a source. He brings a new awareness of forms , an expression of possibilities that lead to a permanent surprise; he is the inventor of a new pictorial approach, totally passionate. For Victor Brauner it is important, via the means of painting, to experience what is beyond understanding. Here a man, in every meaning of the word, is on exhibition. The greatest risks are taken in the relationship of the creator to the created, insofar as the objects of creation are placed in the depths of his being. Brauner's paintings are so many scenes from an inner life : very critical conflicts occur, primordial desires are upheld, capital actions take place, unknown beings play a part. That explains why his paintings are alive with an animal, worrisome presence, are underpinned by an anguishing fleshly density : they are not things one can possess by looking at them , they are living realities that fight hard, joyfully burst forth, or charm us, and which constantly hide their mystery. The way in which Victor Brauner is a painter - and a painter of genius - is that in him expression is always combined with creation : he sets out an immense dream world, but by producing never before seen things from visible forms ; he creates for himself myths of powers, of games or of safeguards, but he turns them into the jumping off point of continual graphic innovations."
Sarane Alexandrian, "La symbolique de Brauner", Cahiers d'Art, Paris, 1949, n°2
Translated in English by Ann Cremin