Understanding the surrealist eye. The epistemological shift in pictorial representation
Understanding the surrealist eye. The epistemological shift in pictorial representation

Summary/Abstract: In his famous "Manifeste du Surréalisme" André Breton proposes the exercise of creative freedom through detachment from the objective external world. But what prevents us from playfully freeing ourselves from the external world, from the first-instance reality, in order to pass into super-reality? The organ that keeps us fixed in the captivity of so-called objectivity,in the so-called "iron cage"; of a rationality that wants to capture the world independent of our minds, is the eye. Therefore, in order to pass from looking outward, from the perception that puts us in contact with the object, to looking inward, to the introspective plunge, the biological eye must be annihilated in favor of the inner eye, not only introspective, but also oneiric and occult.This aesthetic program is based epistemologically on a critique of representational realism and the rejection of the so-called “myth of the given”, the effect of belief in an “innocent eye”. My goal in this paper is to identify the epistemological assumptions that underpinned traditional theories in art, primarily pictorial representational art, and to identify the change at this level that led to new trends in 20th-century art, especially those that made the surrealist movement possible. Considering Victor Brauner as a relevant case, I propose to understand the surrealist eye in three artistically and aesthetically relevant ways, namely, the "suppressed eye", the "autonomous eye" and the "sublimated eye".

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