Forbidden Land 1937

Wolfgang Paalen’s “Forbidden Land” is a landscape conjured up in muted greens and shadowy blacks, a collision of the terrestrial and the surreal. Imagine Paalen, mixing his colors, trying to capture this otherworldliness. Those vertical marks, built up like stalactites, are like some kind of primordial forest, and the spheres falling through them like tears or lost souls. What do they mean? Maybe Paalen was thinking about what's hidden and what we can't touch. The surface of the painting is smooth, but there’s a definite texture in the way the light catches the falling orbs. Each one seems to hold its own tiny universe, a galaxy of color swirling within it. Paalen was a Surrealist, along with artists like Max Ernst and Salvador Dalí. But, like all artists, Paalen had his own path to forge, which he does in the details, like the blue alien figure on the rocks. I think artists are always building on each other's dreams, piecing together a collective vision of reality through the act of painting. And in these strange, evocative forms, there’s a lot we can dream about.