Man Ray - De l'Origine des species par voie de selection irrationelle (III)

Surrealist aesthetics emerged around the 1920s and encompassed all fields of artistic research. Specifically, in the visual arts, Surrealism sought to explore the human subconscious and translate it into artwork through a mechanical writing process based on dream analysis. Consequently, Surrealist artworks propose the representation of a dreamlike dimension, completely dissociated from reality. However, this representation often relies on a hyperrealistic formal rendering, precisely to paradoxically accentuate the illusory and ambiguous nature of the surreal dimension.

In his graphic work, Man Ray primarily developed the Surrealist component of his aesthetic, rather than the Dadaist one (which nevertheless remains essential in the guise of a subversive and irreverent vein). The work in question is part of the series "De l'Origine des especes par voie de selection irrationelle." Stylistically, this production is distinguished above all by its minimalist character. Indeed, the composition is resolved with a simple design of a few graphic lines and the pictorial elegance of very light washes of color. The work is therefore extremely interesting in demonstrating how the master of Dada and the "Rayograph" was capable of creating works of great evocative impact, even with graphic and pictorial means. Despite the synthetic nature of the composition, the ethereal figures possess great expressive potential, and their abstract and surreal nature perfectly aligns with the cosmogonic theme.

Emmanuel Rudnitsky was born in 1890 in Philadelphia (USA). His first solo exhibition took place in 1915. During this last year, he met Marcel Duchamp in France. In 1924, he became close to the Surrealists and participated in the group's various exhibitions. He published (in 1937, with André Breton) the manifesto "Photography is not art." He left France (1940) for eleven long years at the beginning of the war. Man Ray returned to Paris in 1951, where he died in 1976. From 1915, he used photography to reproduce his paintings or as a starting point. He created numerous abstract collages, strange assemblages, and, in the 1920s, "Dada" objects. Man Ray invented (1921) a photographic process that could take impressions of an object without a camera, and discovered solarization, which allowed the accentuation of contours through black lines. A photographer and surrealist painter, he reached abstraction towards the end of the 1950s, without ever abandoning the construction of his incongruous assemblages.

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