Anecdote, Dyptich, Oil on Linen, 81x106 cm and 50x40cm, (32x42" and 20x16".)
On Simon Weir’s “Anecdote” by S.
This is the most quintessentially surrealist painting, the most anachronistically arriviste, a new surrealist object referencing classic surrealist works from a century ago. de Chirico’s empty architectural spaces with steep perspectives, the duplicated objects from Magritte, the hidden lions and dramatic lighting from Dalí, Cézanne Pigeon poo, and the empty sculpture niche nodding Raphael’s Foligno.
The poetic discovery is the transformation of the chair into a surrealist object, latent with associations, transformed psychologically by being associated with two different contexts, and thereafter no longer belonging to either. This new hybrid object is a unique visual idea that is incommunicable by simple literary means, relying on a simultaneity that cannot be conjured with linear language, not even the multiple channels of poetic speech. In the Magritte sense, it is a visual idea, poised, complex and unsatisfied, the chair accelerates one’s energy for life with a respectful and reverent nod towards mystery.
The title adds a layer of meaning. The need for a title, a word that identifies the image, is, like the dyptich, speaking through self-referentiality to undermine the law of the written word. Resisting factuality, the dyptich announces itself as an anecdote, as no more than a rumour, a condensed story, probably half true, and certainly edited for the purposes of visual entertainment. Thereby the chair appears to present itself with the air of falseness. It presents itself on a timber deck at night, and outside stone architecture during the day, and rather than the chair looking like it has taken selfies in multiple locations, we come to believe that it may have been in neither place, and might not be real. Thereby the surrealist object acts with the corrosive power of the simulacra, discrediting its own “so-called” reality. leaving behind the reality of the places. Surrealist objects always have the power to invoke and dismantle realities, or, in more philosophical terms, to invoke the phenomena of withdrawn realities.
+
This dyptich would be well paired by large minimalist sculptures, such as, a group of shiny red cubes.