Eagle Eye exists to explain the gaps—between how we dress and how we live; between the spaces you’re drawn to and the coat you keep reaching for. Each month, London-based designer and creative director Alex Eagle will tap her roster of friends and experts to explore the “why” behind a certain theme—why we’re drawn to certain things, and how those instincts quietly form over years without us really noticing. It’s a column rooted in interior design, with many branches (and, of course, a curated edit of shoppable products to boot).
The first time Surrealism made sense to me, I was quite young. Dalí’s clocks, encountered in a book or on a classroom wall, did something that purely abstract art never quite managed: they let me in. So precise, so real in their rendering, and then completely, quietly wrong. It’s reality with the dial turned just slightly, and I’ve never really recovered from it, if I’m honest. The Venice Art Biennale opened this month under the theme In Minor Keys, curated by the late Koyo Kouoh. It’s a theme that’s intimate, poetic, quietly unsettled—for me, that’s enough to send the mind back to Surrealism.
The term was originally coined in Paris in the 1920s, when the poet André Breton published his manifesto calling for art rooted in the unconscious—dreams, desire, irrationality—as a revolt against the order that had, in his view, led Europe to catastrophe. The movement that followed produced some of the most arresting images in the history of art: Dalí’s melting clocks, Magritte’s bowler-hatted men, Meret Oppenheim’s fur-lined teacup. Its relevance has never felt more immediate than it does right now, in the era of relentless optimization and algorithm-approved wardrobes. As Egyptian designer Laila Gohar, whose objects and tablescapes are among the most Surrealist-inflected pieces being made today, puts it: “Minimalism and quiet luxury is just bloody boring. People want things with a pulse again.”
If modernism, which I wrote about last month, gives permission to edit, Surrealism gives permission to dream. Delfina Delettrez, a jewelry designer whose works operate somewhere between the body and the subconscious, describes it as “desiring without logic—allowing instinct, obsession, memory, contradiction, humor, sensuality, and fantasy to enter the room.” Marie-Louise Scio, CEO and creative director of Il Pellicano with one of the most instinctive collector’s eye I know, frames it more simply. “Surrealism opens the door to emotion, fantasy, and the unexpected.”
Which brings me back to Venice and to Peggy Guggenheim, whose house on the Grand Canal is less museum, more layered, slightly eccentric collage. What I find so compelling about her world is how un-precious it feels: Art not kept at reverent distance, but lived amongst, brushed past on the way to lunch, set slightly askew if that’s how it felt right. That quality is what I look for now in the things I buy and the spaces I build, and I’m not alone. Gohar owns a giant silver teapot that is, she freely admits, completely unusable: too dramatic to pour from, too beautiful to put away. “I love objects that seem functional at first and then slowly reveal themselves as emotional instead,” she says. “A home should not feel so uptight.” In the end, what Surrealism offers is the freedom to hold contradictions without needing to resolve them. Not everything needs to add up. Venice, this month, feels like exactly the right place to remember that.
Shop Alex Eagle’s Guide to Surrealism:
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