"Cine Delirio"

The word surrealism most popularly brings to mind Salvadore Dali and Rene Magritte. Why not? It should. They excelled at what they did and hold permanent rank in what we call surrealism today. Their original work has inspired countless others to follow in the exploitation of unexpected juxtapositions. Now we must make room in our minds for a new crop of artists to titillate our psyche and expand our dreamscapes with their own deliriums and visions.

This February The Shooting Gallery is proud to host "Cine Delirio", a four man surrealist exhibition featuring the paramount work of Shawn Barber, Eric Joyner, Lee Harvey Roswell and Nathan Spoor. Twenty new paintings and various others will be on display the whole month.

But, when in our own epoch of rampant, nearly omnipresent advertising and wholesale manufacturing of desire it would seem surrealism and the "chance meeting on an operating table of a sewing machine and an umbrella" may have been liquidated of all their revolutionary profundity. It may be asked, 'is this not an appropriate fate for an art movement that’s dictionary-concise objective was the emancipation of desire?' Is it now just a gold plated baiting breast to the consumer’s unconscious appetites. Cine Delirio unabashedly demonstrates not only that profundity is intact and that the temptation of the surreal teat is a well of vital nutrition, but that these questions are in fact replete with impertinent assumptions and phobias regarding both human desire and acts of commerce.

Contributing artist Lee Harvey Roswell makes no hesitation, "human desire is the root source of art; sublimated sexual impulses that manifest new objects of desire. An excruciating libidinal paradox for a characteristically overly-libidinous trade." He credits surrealism as the first art movement to specifically aim at exposing and liberating the psychic mechanics of the creative process and in doing so, inevitably tear away at the moral conduct of the day.

Also do not forget the history Cine Delirio aligns with: an artistic school of thought that held up the Marquis de Sade (the infamous libertine writer from whom we derive the term ‘sadism’) as an icon of ethical instruction. The Id, which de Sade made himself a physical maifestation of, was the group's trademark political cause and they meant to see it freed. The Id remember is by definition violent, self-serving and the very antithesis of all that’s ethical; the monster inside if you will.

So by all means indulge in the new era of surrealist imagery, but step cautiously too through the scenes of Cine Delirio. These delights should be held suspect. These men, scoundrels. This sale, only selling you desire.