Multimedia: "Dali in Africa"

http://www.saatchi-gallery.co.uk/yourgallery/artist_profile/a/90189.html

copyright MRust 2008

"There is no dominant painting style in Surrealism. Considered from the point of view of technique it exhibited three main tendencies. The first tendency (which proved in the short term to be the most innovatory in terms of physical working methods) was that of discovering imagery by mechanical techniques where chance was exploited. The purpose was to 'irritate' the vision, to stimulate the imagination and to force inspiration.

Andre Breton's phrase 'pure psychic automatism' was intended to apply to the process of writing and Breton even gave practical hints on how to do it. In 1930 he published his second Manifeste du surréalisme in which he defined 'surreality' as the reconciliation of the reality of dreams with the reality of everyday life into a higher synthesis.
Underlying the interest in automatism and dream lay the Surrealist notion of what was called 'objective chance'. They believed that the existence of coincidences (events for which there were no rational explanations) was evidence and that true reality was not ordered or logical. Access to reality could only be gained through the unconscious mind.