“Surreality”, a sort of reality of the unconscious («superior degree of reality connected to certain forms of association», connected to the «omnipotence of the dream» and to the «disinterested game of the thought», as Breton wrote in 1924 in the Surrealism Manifesto), which actually becomes freedom of the reality, is the goal the surrealists wanted to achieve through the “pure psychic automatism”, a kind of “dictation of the thought, without any control by the reason, without any aesthetic or moral concern”, “through which we aim to express (…) in any way how does the real thought works” (A. Breton, Surrealism Manifesto, in Surrealism Manifestos, Turin 1987, page 30).
I have been aiming for this for a long time. In relationship with the historic Surrealism, I had two paths to follow: the first was through the historicization-musealization, that’s to say through the philological study of the processes and modalities of that vanguard; being then forced to propose it again as a quotation in a rationalized and anachronistic way. I chose the other path, far from any sterile intellectualism: operating without following any rule and, going against what Breton said, adding an «aesthetic and moral concern» to the surrealistic inspiration. I searched, within the automatism, which regularly shows the morbidity of thought and the relative diversity of truth, the possible objectivity of Beauty based on the absolute contrast.
I believe that within a subjective perspective of Surrealism, an objective report is to be found, since the structure of psychic automatism (the dream, the lapsus, the irrationality) is common to everybody. I try to investigate – in a psycho-oneiric way – a new objective hypothesis of Beauty in the skinny bodies of my feminine (more than female) figures, with such alien, astral, anti-Hellenistic anatomies, (recalling the snake lines of Dalì figures of the 40’s), in the pear like heads, in the faces peeled like archetypal apples. A critic once spoke about a “contrasted contemplation of the undrawable beauty of women” , of an “obstinated negation of the soothing, latent in all his images but full of negativity which though, doesn’t want to appear as such. (C. Strinati, Presentation, in Enzo Carnebianca, Life’s key, exhibition catalogue, Rome 1997, pp. 9-11).
The result is a distress which I would define as an intense “illness” characterising most part of the surrealistic experience, only partially common to the paranoid or play dimension.
My sculpture can take to the matter (particularly the body) to a condition of immateriality (as E. Mercuri suggested, in Enzo Carnebianca, exhibition catalogue, Rome 1991-1992, p. 3) drawing, through dreaming (L. Tallarico, ibidem, p. 11), from a surreality that has to be denied in order to be objectivised. This is the reason why my figures always tend to the high, to elevation, to transcendence. Once I get it, the new form (neither a specious one, nor a buxom one) only asks to flow away from itself.
My pursuit can not, and must not, have an end.
Enzo Carnebianca