Image Alchemy

Surrealist collage and melancholy in Walter Benjamin

Abstract

For Surrealism, collage represents both an artistic technique, common in the context of the avant-garde, and a fundamental element of its poetics for the composition of images, which find their power in the rapprochement between two or more distinct and incompatible realities. Defined by Max Ernst as “alchemy of visual image”, the intended effect of surrealist collage is the short-circuiting of common perception, capable of creating a strangeness in the face of everyday and habitual life. The present work aims to propose a relationship between surrealist collage and the concept of melancholy presented by Walter Benjamin, understanding it as an allegorical procedure, and analyzing its connection with the “organization of pessimism” as “revolutionary melancholy”.