Le domaine enchanté at Acappella

Artists: Sebastian Burger, Alex Chaves, Leon Eisermann, Sayre Gomez, Morgan Mandalay, Orion Martin, Alexandra Noel, Zoé de Soumagnat

Exhibition title: Le domaine enchanté

Curated by: Domenico de Chirico

Venue: Acappella, Naples, Italy

Date: July 14 – October 10, 2016

Photography: all images copyright and courtesy of the artists and Acappella, Naples

Galleria Acappella is pleased to announce a group exhibition titled ‘Le domaine enchanté’ curated by Domenico de Chirico featuring works by Sebastian Burger, Alex Chaves, Leon Eisermann, Sayre Gomez, Morgan Mandalay, Orion Martin, Alexandra Noel, Zoé de Soumagnat.

Le saboteur tranquille (1898 – 1967) arguably the most influential figure in Belgian Surrealism, has succeeded in painting pictures— often imbued with dark humour—that channel those obsessions and feelings of eeriness and displacement that arise when seeking an answer to the mystery of life and when trying to work out the processes of thought and human perceptions.

René Magritte has elected painting as his preferred means of investigation. He goes about it by raising doubts on reality itself and addressing totality as a mystery, never seeking to define it. Nor does he ever reach other dimensions, since his idea of absurdity does not inhabit the realms of the unknown or the utopic, but it is found instead in day-to-day reality.

For this reason, his image —obsessively recurrent and ambiguously ironic— is primarily a reproduction of what occurs in reality but on top of that, it is also an illusionary joke, articulated through a visual language characterized by utter simplicity of enunciation and stylistic immediacy.

Enigma, nonsense, irrationality and displacement in the realm of the symbols, images and patterns that inhabit the subconscious are the conceits surrealism has wilfully conveyed.

This whole exhibition is freely inspired, both in a surrealistic and in a metaphorical way, by René Magritte’s mural painting ‘Le domaine enchanté‘ (1953 circa, Knokke-le-Zoute, Casino, Belgium): among the most emblematic pieces in his oeuvre, a large scale and paramount summary of his main iconographical leitmotif.