Esteban FRANCÉS.

Untitled. 1939. Oil and scratch on wood (21,5 x 26,5 cm): frame in worked wood. Superb surrealist composition by the Catalan painter, dated 1939: it was executed shortly before his departure into exile. Powerful, the painting is part of the series inspired by the Civil War. A painting dated 1938 entitled Brote (Epidemic) appeared in the fourth Geneviève and Jean-Paul Kahn sale (2021, no. 173). Trained at the "Lonja" School in Barcelona and close to the avant-garde groups, Esteban Francés (1913-1976) was introduced to the principles of Surrealism in 1934 when he met Remedios Varo, Oscar Dominguez and Marcel Jean. He exhibited for the first time in 1936 in the mythical Exposicion Logicofobiste, a surrealist exhibition against bourgeois art, bringing together all the Republican tendencies. It was at this event that Benjamin Péret, who had joined the Durruti columns that had come to fight with the Anarchists on the Terruel front, met Remedios Varo, who was to become his wife. In 1939, in a famous article in the magazine Minotaure entitled Des tendances les plus récentes de la peinture surréaliste (The most recent trends in Surrealist painting), Breton celebrated Esteban Francés: "An invisible hand takes his and helps him to free the great hallucinatory figures that were in power in this amalgam. He discovers for us crackling landscapes, guides us along a mysterious river with waters bitten like the Styx."