” I AM SURREALISM”
Surrealism was a very important cultural movement which found expression in the visual arts, literature and cinema. It originated in Paris and flourished in Europe from the 1920s, during the period between the two world wars. Surrealism seeks to express a higher reality, made up of the irrational and dreamlike, to reveal the deeper aspects of the psyche.
The basic philosophy of the movement was characterized by the unexpected juxtaposition of objects, in scenarios normal, which challenged the viewer’s imagination.
André Breton, one of the major exponents and the main theorist of the movement, as well as author of the Manifesto of Surrealism (1924), declared:
“Surrealism was a way of bringing conscious and unconscious experiences together so completely as to merging the two spheres of reality and fantasy in the rationality of daily life, according to a reality absolute and a surreality”
Salvador Dalí is considered the most eclectic and incisive figure of the Surrealist movment, with his fantastic and phantasmic projection of “dream” and subconscious or pre-conscious thought into a visionary pseudo-reality.