Exhibition Type: Group Exhibition
Artist(s): Mahefa Dimbiniana Randrianarivelo (Madagascar) and Le Paon Atypique (Réunion Island)
Venue: Alliance Française du Cap
Address: 155 Loop Street, Cape Town
Surrealism in photography aims to express the real functioning of thought, free from the control of reason and from aesthetic or moral concerns.
Early surrealist photographers in the early 20th century, precursors to André Breton’s Surrealist Manifesto, chose to reject the norms and realities of their time, thus creating a poetics of the strange.
The evolution of photographic techniques has provided artists with various means to free themselves from reality and pursue their own truth.
While some photographers seek to approach what a human being is and feels at their deepest level, within the unconscious, others aim to surprise the viewer and immerse them in a dreamlike state.
These two approaches can be found in the work of Mahefa Dimbiniana Randrianarivelo, a Malagasy photographer, and Le Paon atypique, a photographer from La Réunion.
Through their surrealist propositions, they move beyond reality, deconstruct its material frameworks, and access a deeper, more intimate truth—one that cannot be grasped because it does not exist in material form. If the viewer accepts to free themselves from their own constraints, they may encounter a subtle poetry, a bittersweet softness, a familiar strangeness.
While surrealism has been widely explored in Europe by artists such as Tommy Ingberg, Oleg Oprisco, and Vincent Bourrillon, I find a distinct and relevant poetic quality in the work of these two artists that would be meaningful to present.
