A place that exists nowhere, painted as fact

The signature of the picture is a paradox you can state in one line: it is the meticulous, illusionistic rendering of things that exist nowhere. Tanguy paints his invented objects with hard, almost academic precision (convincing weight, convincing shadow, convincing recession into deep space) so that wholly fictitious shapes read as solidly present as boulders in a field. The Buffalo AKG, which owns the picture, sums up the whole project in a sentence: “Without employing direct references to the real world, Yves Tanguy painted surreal landscapes laden with strange, indeterminate forms.” The effort goes not into inventing the forms (that part seems to have come easily) but into making the invention convincing.

The objects are deliberately not anything. They are smooth and modeled and weighted, yet the eye keeps reaching for a word (a machine, a stack of bones, a tower of polished stones) and the word keeps not fitting. Tanguy worked the other way around from a painter who draws an object and then renders it. He let strange, indeterminate forms surface, and then gave each one the full apparatus of academic painting: highlight, shadow, modeled curve, a cast shadow on the ground. The result is that you believe a place you cannot name, which is exactly the unease the picture trades in.

At the center of the picture a tall assembly of stacked forms rises from the plain and dominates the foreground, throwing a long dark shadow across the empty ground. The deep, raking shadow is the clearest trace of de Chirico, the painter who had stopped Tanguy in the street twenty years earlier: that same theatrical, late-afternoon darkness pooling out from solid shapes onto a vacant floor. What it is a shadow ofstays open, because Tanguy invented his forms from nothing, so naming them is the viewer’s reflex and not the picture’s claim. De Chirico had cast his shadows across recognizable arcades and statues. Tanguy casts the same kind of shadow across a floor and a set of objects he made up entirely. The borrowed device is doing new work: it lends the weight of a real, observed scene to a place that was never observed because it was never there.