Expositions Malingue

VICTOR BRAUNER

For the past few years, the Galerie 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