Óscar Domínguez

Vilhelm Bjerke-Petersen, Paris (acquired from the artist circa 1938)

Galerie André Petit, Paris

Private Collection

Sotheby’s, London, 3 July 1973, lot 101 (consigned by the above)

Private Collection (acquired at the above sale)

Acquired by 1978 by the present owner

Oslo, Kunstnerforbundet, International nutidskunst, 1938, no. 11 (titled Loggikens leg)

Paris, Centre Pompidou, Paul Éluard et ses amis peintres, 1982-83

New York, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Surrealism: Two Private Eyes, 1999, vol. I, no. 69, p. 129, illustrated in color

Marseille, Musée Cantini, La part du jeu et du rêve: Óscar Domínguez et le surréalisme 1906-1957, 2005, no. 40; p. 40

Fernando Castro Borrego, Óscar Domínguez y el surrealismo, Madrid, 1978, p. 127, illustrated

Exh. Cat., Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, Centro Atlantico de Arte Moderno; Santa Cruz de Tenerife, Centro de Arte “La Granja” and Madrid, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Óscar Domínguez 1926 Antològica 1957, 1996, p. 40, illustrated

Exh. Cat., Cabildo Insular de Tenerife, Éxodo hacia el Sur. Óscar Domínguez y el Automatismo Absoluto 1938-1942, 2006, p. 68, illustrated in color

Exh. Cat., Paris, Instituto Cervantes, El surrealismo volcánico, 2006, p. 78, illustrated in color

José Carlos Guerra Cabrera, Obra, contexto y tragedia, Islas Canarias, 2020, p. 52, illustrated in color

One of Óscar Domínguez’ most celebrated and emblematic works, La Machine à écrire ou Le Jeu de la logique is a visionary tour de force painted in 1938, at the height of the artist’s immersion within the Parisian Surrealist circle. A hallucinatory image, the canvas stages a pair of anthropomorphised typewriters in the act of coupling, their mechanical forms sprouting tendrils that writhe across a rocky landscape. At once startling and poetic, the composition unites Domínguez’ two most significant contributions to Surrealist painting—the decalcomania technique and lithochronic painting.

Born in Tenerife, Domínguez emerged as one of the most distinctive voices of European Surrealism. After moving to Paris in the late 1920s, he became closely associated with André Breton’s circle, bringing to the movement a visionary sensibility rooted in the volcanic landscapes and mythic imagination of the Canary Islands. A restless experimenter, Domínguez forged a pictorial language in which chance, desire and the unconscious converge—making him one of Surrealism’s most original and alchemical figures.

Decalcomania, a semi-automatic transfer technique first pioneered by Domínguez in the mid-1930s and later embraced by Max Ernst and others, exploits the chance impressions generated when one painted surface is pressed against another, producing fantastical structures that inspire new forms. Much lauded by André Breton in the late 1930s, lithochronic painting was a unique invention of Domínguez’ own devising - the name referring to stone (lithos) and time (chronos) that aimed to conjure visions of new worlds from a fourth dimensional perspective, wherein time itself is petrified, and past, present and future exist simultaneously.

Marking a rare combination of both these pioneering approaches, La Machine à écrire is a work that confronts the viewer with a bizarre futuristic image in which both the archaic and the modern are combined into what one critic has called “a vision of industrial modernity as a relic of a primordial past” (Abigail Susik, Surrealist Sabotage and the War on Work, Manchester, 2021, p. 158).

La Machine à écrire is one of the finest examples of a suite of highly evocative paintings involving machines in strange archetypal landscapes that Domínguez made in the late 1930s. Like the sewing machine, which for Surrealists had gained iconic status ever since the Comte de Lautréamont had declared the uncanny beauty of “a chance encounter between a sewing machine and an umbrella on a dissecting table,’” the typewriter came to possess talismanic allure. In Berlin in 1918 for example, Dadaists had famously organised an absurdist race between a sewing machine and a typewriter; Jacques Vaché, in 1919, envisioned an “octopus typewriter.” In the early 1920s the typewriter had also gained a specific aura of mystery among Surrealists when it was used as a means of dream transcription by the Paris group who had famously had themselves photographed standing around the machine at a seance while dictating to an eager female typist.

La Machine à écrire is one of two famous paintings depicting animated typewriters that Domínguez made in 1938. The other, Souvenir de l’avenir bears a title that relates directly to the pseudo-scientific theory of lithochronism that Domínguez had formulated in the late 1930s with his friend, the Argentinean scientist and writer, Ernesto Sabato; a title such as Souvenir de l’avenir could evoke a future world in which a typewriter had come to life or, as in La Machine à écrire, one in which autonomous typewriters become living entities, approximating organic growth and persisting in some post-human epoch—what Surrealist painter Marcel Jean described as a “small and solitary object” that approximates the “organic surfaces of nature and flourishes [in a future era] long after the interference of humans has vanished” (Marcel Jean quoted in Abigail Susik, ibid., p. 159).

Domínguez’ visions of a future era without humans in which machines had developed an autonomous semi-organic life of their own was to persist in his work throughout the 1940s—sentiments which today resonate with contemporary anxieties and excitements about the future of Artificial Intelligence. His notion of the petrification of space and time was to culminate in 1939 in the lithochronic network of geometry to be found in the appropriately entitled painting La Nostalgie de l’espace (The Museum of Modern Art, New York). Domínguez’ lithochronic theory inspired André Breton to write a manifesto about the theory and, in his 1938 book, Trajectoire du rêve, recorded a dream he had which featured a painting by Domínguez.

La Machine à écrire reflects a distinctly Surrealist view of machines as animate beings, subject to human impulses of sex and violence. Like all Surrealist objects, the machines in his 1930s paintings are charged with eroticism, morbidity and desire. Among the most famous of these is his 1934 painting Machine à coudre électro-sexuelle, which reimagines the sewing machines as a sado-masochistic device. In La Machine à écrire this fetishization of the machine is extended into a futuristic domain seemingly beyond conventional notions of space and time.

While decalcomania rocks, abandoned amphorae and rich green vegetation combine against a misty, Yves Tanguy-like sky to generate an archaic sense of a timeless, petrified landscape, the expanding green tendrils of the typewriters paradoxically imbue this landscape with an organic sense of the sprouting of new life. “Certain surfaces that we call lithochronic open a window onto the strange world of the fourth dimension, constituting a kind of solidification of time,” Domínguez had written in 1939 in an article titled “The Petrification of Time.” With its elegant articulation of modern office machinery revitalising an ancient volcanic landscape, La Machine à écrire is a work that exemplifies both this vision as and André Breton’s famous assertion in the second manifesto of Surrealism of the strange poetic truth to be found in the seemingly impossible conjunction of opposites. “Everything leads us to believe,” Breton wrote, “that there exists a point in the mind from which life and death, the real and the imaginary, the past and the future, the high and the low, the communicable and the incommunicable will cease to appear contradictory” (André Breton, Second Manifesto of Surrealism, Paris, 1929).

Hailed as a masterpiece by the leading expert on the artist, Isidro Hernández, La Machine à écrire also bears distinguished early provenance, having been acquired circa 1938 following its inclusion in the landmark exhibition International nutidskunst at the Kunstnerforbundet in Oslo. Organized by the Danish artist and theorist Vilhelm Bjerke-Petersen—an important conduit between Scandinavian and French Surrealism—the exhibition brought together works by the movement’s luminaries including Domínguez, Salvador Dalí, Jean Arp, Joan Miró, Max Ernst, René Magritte and Yves Tanguy, among others, reflecting the close international dialogue that defined the movement. Notably, the only surviving photograph of an individual artwork from the 1938 exhibition preserved in Vilhelm Bjerke-Petersen’s archives is of La Machine à écrire. This early provenance underscores the exceptional caliber of the present work and exemplifies the vital cross-cultural exchange at the height of European Surrealism in the 1930s.