Pays interdit

Paalen started to work on this picture during the first two weeks of October 1936 after a severe psychogenic crisis. In August 1936, he had to learn that a prolonged affair of Pablo Picasso with his wife Alice (Alice Rahon) had led to a pregnancy and abortion.[1] Paalen later commented on the depressions which he could finally channel into a proper furor of creation resulting in some of his best works of the surrealist period: "It was as if the fire, or the germ to it, collapsed into itself, and in its place all that is terrible comes to the fore. During the day I can hardly think out of rage, leeriness or guilt, let alone talk with anyone. At night I am dying of fear, everything could be shattered. Peace is such a distant notion, hardly recognizable during those dark days. Perhaps it will be painting that pulls me out of these blows of frightful darkness and can put together the few stones that I no longer find in the empty world. And if this does not work, at least I know for sure that it is not about to have an ego, but only to listen the call to life when faced with absolute nothingness. My vision has once more turned inward. I now can say rightly, I contemplate like the old pagan Apollonius, from within."[2] Back in Paris after a realigning journey to Greece in October 1936, he began to work on the mysterious picture that would occupy him until the following year and should testimony this fall into the abyss of death almost solemnly described with reference to the mystic Apollonius of Tyana: an apocalyptic landscape dominated by a female deity and falling meteoric planets. Pays interdit is also the first oil painting in which the Fumage is elaborately worked into the fine crystalline structures of the lower part. Paalen designs his personal model of the permeable surreal soul-image in the form of a fragmented landscape, pulsating with a mixture of feminine mysticism and romantic shudder, reminiscent of pre-Celtic fairies and their cosmic allusions as they are known from the lyrical tradition of Brittany. The poet friend André Breton spoke in view of this prototyp for the later great Fumages from 1937–39 of symbols for a kind of extended inner view: Paalen attempts "nothing less than to attain total lucidity by effecting the osmosis not only of the visible and visionary, but of all those mysteriously alluring entities that lurk beneath the surface of the creations of "primitive" art. (...) Paalen´s secret lies in having succeeded in seeing, in letting us see from the inside of the bubble."[3]

Striking in this picture is the colour in the upper part – subtly graded green tones, which look as if painted on gold – and in the lower part a fine execution of expanding crystalline spatial structures, suggestions of mucous membranes and moist inner tissue. The Fumage-spots are only visible in some places like black holes. The arm- and legless stone figure with its balloon-shaped body parts – belly, breasts and head – was biographically interpreted as a mythologized portrait of the friend Eva Sulzer, to whom Paalen refuged during the crisis with his wife: as a kind of Eva of the future, a woman, which was not born, but owes its life directly to the divine forces. Even unintentionally, she embodies the navel of the world where the past and the future are touching, a unity of womb, uterus and mother, or as James Joyce described it: "Heva. Naked Eva. She had no navel. Look."[4] Paalen had previously visited the oracle in Delphi with its Omphalos, the rounded, symbolic stone column for the navel of the world, that reportedly fell from the sky as a meteorite triggered by lightning and subsequently used as a sacrificial stone altar of the goddess Gaia.[5] Delphi is devoted to the earth goddess Gaia (from "delphos" – Greek womb), and with her oracle, once reconfigured by the female priestess Pythia, was surely one of the dream places on the inner map of the artist, looking for deep symbols for birth and linguistic forms for an original femininity communicating directly from the uterus. Paalen's friend, the German writer Gustav Regler, spoke in view of the image of his "realm of Amazons": "On a planet, that is circling around the great streets, quietly and musingly, lies the realm. (...) Far from there, he speaks to women, as if they belonged to his distant stars. (...) And he calls one queen, since she can not hide herself; Her tall figure turnes every branch of a tree under which she stands, into a floriferous homage, she looks to the mountains, as if they were her palaces; Shores are for her the strips of blessed amalgamation with the sun. The sea receives her like a repatriate, every time she betrays the shore, and it seems as if she were now living in the element that breathes on the pulse of the stars; (...) / time is to him invasion of space / and is to be measured according to the number of comets that hit upon her element, that made her visible and luminous, that consumed and nourished her. But the gods are creatures of these rustling streams, fragments of the falling stars, (...) His feeling that we are always on the brink of infinity, that the abyss accompanies us as a faithful shadow. (...) like meteors in the desert."[6] The fertility symbolism of the figure and the larger, transparent one of the three spheres with the enclosed allusions for earth, femininity, erosion and an enfolding pre-birth space stand together in a compositional harmony, hieratically floating in front of the impenetrable thicket of the terrestrial abyss. The idea of the meteorite attacks had perhaps come from the reading of Camille Flammarion's visionary novel La Fin du Monde in which Eve was destined to contemplate the dying earth after a meteorite impact until her own icing.[7]

• Andreas Neufert: Wolfgang Paalen. Im Inneren des Wals. Springer, Wien und New York 1999 (Monography with Catalogue raisonné).
• Dieter Schrage (1999), "Paalen, Wolfgang Robert", Neue Deutsche Biographie (NDB) (in German), 19, Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, pp. 733–734; (full text online)
• Amy Winter: Wolfgang Paalen. Artist and Theorist of the Avantgarde Praeger, Westport (Connecticut) 2002.
• Andreas Neufert: Auf Liebe und Tod. Das Leben des Surrealisten Wolfgang Paalen. Parthas, Berlin 2015, ISBN 978-3-86964-083-9.

• official webpage on Wolfgang Paalen
• Akademie der Bildenden Künste, Karlsruhe
• Exhibition "The Colour of my Dreams – The Revolution in Surrealist Art" Vancouver Art Gallery 2011