Tuesday 17 January 2012

Esteban Francés

untitled

untitled

Composicion surrealista

El cuadro de los abanicos

El cortejo

Renard, figurin para El Zorro

Brote

Alborada. Paisaje explosivo

Alambradas

The Spanish artist Esteban Francés (1913-1976) barely figures in Gérald Durozoi's History of the Surrealist Movement, in spite of a detail of one of his works being featured on the front cover:

An aquaintance of Remedios [Varo]'s in Barcelona was Esteban Francés, within the "logicophobist" group that since 1935 had been concerned with the "external representation of the internal states of the human soul." For Francés, the transition to surrealism was a natural one and made all the more easily in that his technique of "grattage" was greeted with approval. While he worked with a "wandering" razor blade on a layer of colors dispersed with no preconceived idea, "an invisible hand takes his own and helps it to retreive the large hallucinatory figures latent" in the amalgam of colors.

And that's pretty much all we're told. The above images are from here, and there's a bit more information here, while (almost inevitably) 50 Watts has a feature on a children's (?!) book he collaborated on.


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Speaking of obscure surrealist artists, Form Is Void (a great blog I've only just begun to explore) turned up some extraordinary paintings by the Hungarian Lili Ország (no mention of her in Durozoi's book).