Wolfgang Paalen

Wolfgang Paalen: Implicit Spaces

Essay by Andreas Neufert


In 1949 the great art critic Harold Rosenberg observed that the new Abstract Expressionist painters were lately inspired "by something they themselves have not yet seen." How could legendary artists such as Motherwell, Pollock and Gorky have been inspired by the same premonition or intuition? The concept invoked by Rosenberg - a relationship between the usual indeterminacy facing the painter and the power of forms taking their being from the onlooker's state of mind, as pictorial language, was in fact the most urgently discussed issue in 1940's New York. Those millimeters between the visible and invisible turned out to be miles, whole dimensions leading to an entirely new idea of space. This space was supposed to reflect the open, implicit part of matter itself, what Aristotle had called kata to dynaton (what potentially is). Implicitness and contingency became key terms in the lexicon of post-war painting, and these terms were introduced by one man alone, the painter and theorist Wolfgang Paalen. The agitated Paalen had been restlessly driving to set the stage for an artistic upheaval. He exhibited only two times in New York, in 1940 at the Julien Levy Gallery and in 1945 at Peggy Guggenheim's Art of this Century, but his art magazine DYN would turn out to be the most influential messenger of ideas before the war had ended.

It was in Paris in January 1938, where many met the Viennese born painter Wolfgang Paalen for the first time, prominently visible in the Surrealist group that gathered around the French poet Andre Breton. Together with Marcel Duchamp, Man Ray and Salvador Dali he was among those responsible for the design of the International Exhibition of Surrealism in the Palais des Beaux Arts in Paris, where he installed one of the first environments beneath Duchamp's ceiling of empty sacks of coal. It was composed of limp oak leaves and a water-filled pond with actual water lilies and reeds. The opening began at 10 p.m., and the visitors reached the intimidating grotto-like, mutated exhibition space using only the illumination afforded by flash lights distributed by Man Ray at the entrance. They passed initially through a corridor lined with remodelled shop-window dummies. Around midnight in the crazy gleam of the pale light cones the visitors witnessed the dancing shimmer of a sparsely dressed girl who suddenly arose from the reeds, jumped on a bed, abruptly lapsed into hysterical shrieks - Dali's idea -, and disappeared just as quickly. Due to the strange lighting, the exhibition's topics functioned rather as a distillate of art, focusing predominantly on each work's reciprocal relationship with the viewer and his own emotional receptivity. And when the excited visitors then started to illuminate themselves with their torches, the transformation was complete and each appeared as a work of art him or herself.

Here art functioned as a medium-like mirror of hallucinations: the doll Paalen decorated and Man Ray documented in photographs, with her silk scarf, the bat above her head, and the eerie leaf dress covered with mushrooms, resembles the scarcely visible, hovering and gliding totemistic fairy creatures of Paalen's paintings. He exhibited these works, painted with ephemeral traces of candle smoke and oil, in the Surrealist gallery Renou et Colle in May of the same year. Breton and Duchamp eventually perceived and encouraged these paintings as a mysterious darkness, the understated warnings of a Romantic who appeared to refer to his feelings as his only objective. But perhaps they did not expect that this vision would emerge only shortly later as a large-scale project conceived by a highly reflective artist who evidently felt secure enough to give painting and its moral impact a completely new foundation.

Please contact gallery for exhibition catalogue with full essay.