This is a gallery narrative written in the voice and style of Julien Levy (1906–1981), the pioneering American art dealer who introduced Surrealism to the United States. His gallery was a haven for the experimental, the dreamlike, and the uncanny.
EXHIBITION: The Sleepwalker’s Relic
MEDIUM: Psychosexual magma, arrested in time.
A Note from Julien Levy:
We do not invite you to look at sculpture today. Looking is too passive an act for what sits before you on this wooden altar. We invite you, instead, to witness an eruption.
This object is a fugitive. I have it on good authority that it began its life trapped in the two-dimensional prison of a canvas, a flattened hallucination. Yet, through some spasm of the artist’s will—or perhaps a failure of reality itself—it refused to stay put. It has burst forth, shedding its skin of paint and reassembling itself into this terrible, undeniable solidity.
It is a marvelous monstrosity.
Look at the color. It is not the orange of a fruit or a sunset. It is the color of amber that has trapped a prehistoric scream. It is the color of dried blood on a bandages, illuminated from within by an alchemical fire. It is the hue of a fever dream just before waking.
And the texture—ah, the “convulsive beauty” that Breton speaks of! It has not been sculpted by chisel or hand. It appears, rather, to have been vomited by the subconscious and instantly calcified upon contact with our cold air. It is a landscape of ruined desires, a topography of scar tissue. It is sticky to the eye, yet repulsive to the touch.
As you circle this L’objet Incendié, consider its form. Is it a figure? Two lovers fused in a Pompeian catastrophe? A piece of furniture possessed by a demon? It is all of these and none. It is the precise moment when the recognizable world melts into the irrational. It is a monument to that fleeting split-second between a nightmare and the waking world, frozen forever in amber slag.
Approach with caution. It is a beautiful, fragile brutality. It does not belong in this clean light. It belongs in the attic of your mind, the thing you find when you are looking for something else entirely.
— Julien Levy, New York City