Pérégrinations de Georges Hugnet (Peregrinations of Georges Hugnet)

Pérégrinations de Georges Hugnet (Peregrinations of Georges Hugnet) is a Surrealist object by Óscar Domínguez that participated in the Exposition surréaliste d’objets, organised in the Galerie Charles Ratton in Paris in 1936. Domínguez dedicated the work to his friend, the poet Georges Hugnet, who, as an art critic, published an article in the avant-garde magazine Cahiers d’Art which was centred on the artist’s Surrealist objects. The composition bears a resemblance to Domínguez’s other works, for instance the painting Le dimanche (The Sunday, 1935) and the decalcomania work Lion-bicyclette (Lion-Bicycle, 1936), both with a theme which is the disparity of desire and will as objects moving in opposite directions.

This picture-relief is made from small toy objects the artist assembled and combined to shape a clashing and poetic composition. As Hugnet asserted, Domínguez’s Surrealist objects “lit the imagination to coruscatingly and convulsively illuminate our obsessions”. The work, with its white frame — the same colour as the background — contributes to the idea of pictorial illusion, so that, as Hugnetwrote: “The object is not an image but rather a supreme game of truth”.



Carmen Fernández Aparicio