![]() It rises to the level of archetype, representing a broader spectrum of violence and unease. The pain in the painting transcends the specifics of its time and place. The varied readings of these wild figures add to the work’s surreality. It could suggest the exploitative ferocity of the Portuguese colonizers, ruthlessly thirsting for power, or the psychological state of Mozambicans, who were pushed into war with their oppressors (as Malangatana shared in a 2007 interview, during the fight for independence, Mozambicans had no way out). Like all good art, though, the image is broad in implication. The figures appear to be in a hellish prisonscape-fitting, as Malangatana himself was arrested only four years prior for revolutionary activities. Sounds of a feeding frenzy seem to buzz forth. The center figure is being eaten alive, blood dripping down his chest, his eyes wide in horror. At the Met, an untitled work from 1967 features a compressed pack of bright and feral, phantasmagoric beasts. Through the ’60s, as Malangatana participated in Mozambique’s protracted war for independence from Portugal, the surrealist touch was vital-it allowed his images to be legibly brutal without being (perhaps incriminatingly) specific. The Mozambican artist Malangatana Ngwenya (known professionally as Malangatana) adapted surrealist tradition in this very way. Radical nonconformism was a central tenet, which led some artists to use the form to challenge the pressures and constraints of oppressive regimes. ![]() The Freudian-influenced idea was that by unlocking the unconscious, artists could assert the independence of their and their viewers’ interior worlds. ![]() Artists deployed surrealist techniques to process demons, both internal and external, but also to challenge conventional thinking (is a pipe really a pipe, as René Magritte famously queried?) and to express fantasies of artistic or political liberation. Its founder, André Breton, defined surrealism as pure “psychic automatism”-in which the whims of the artist’s unconscious direct their art making. The Met’s exhibition aims to show a nonchronological and nongeographical view of surrealism, which became a transnational aesthetic phenomenon after being formally established in Paris in 1924 and spreading globally throughout the 20th century. If disquieting sensory experiences abound in daily life, why go and seek more out? That question might be put to visitors of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s “Surrealism Beyond Borders” exhibition, a show filled with grotesque representations of political upheaval and private horror, but also with thrillingly odd and beautiful demonstrations of imagination. A YouTube algorithm provides me, for instance, with videos of a pimple-popping bonanza, or a series of videos in which young men eat glue. ![]() To be on the internet today is to confront unsettling images-of war, climate change, humanitarian crises. ![]()
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