Anecdote, (diptych), Oil on Linen, 66x106 cm and 50x40cm, (32x42" and 20x16".)
On Simon Weir’s “Anecdote” by S.
This is Weir’s most quintessentially surrealist painting, the most anachronistically and objectionably arriviste, a new surrealist object referencing revivalist classic works. Giorgio de Chirico’s empty architectural spaces with steep perspectives, the duplicated objects from René Magritte, the hidden lions and dramatic lighting from Salvador Dalí, Cézanne Pigeon poo, and the empty sculpture niche of Raphael Senzio’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.
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 written word. Resisting factuality, the dyptich announces itself as an anecdote, as no more than a rumour, nor more than half true, and certainly edited for the purposes of entertainment. Thereby the chair we can see that the chair presents itself with an air of falseness, of theatricality, of actorliness. It presents itself on a timber deck at night, and outside stone architecture at 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.
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always have the power to invoke and dismantle realities, or, in more philosophical terms, to invoke the phenomena of withdrawn realities, and the menacing corrosiveness of the sublime simulacra.
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This dyptich would be well paired by large minimalist sculptures, such as, a group of satin-shiny red cubes atoped by as many long asparaguses as possible.