All surrealist paintings are abundant in symbols and you might generally consider them allegorical, since the canvases portray surrealist images, born in the twilight states of mind or conveying them. Their combination may be – and should be! – irrational, it’s the starting poing of surrealism.

Irrationality may refer to the combination of characteristics, attributes, functions of objects depicted, and actually the combination of objects per se. All these attributes, functions and characteristics are taken from real life – but their combination and the conflicts it suggests are merely the phantom of the unleashed subconsiousness. In real world cheese melts in the sun, and the clock sits on the mantelpiece, but after the grinding, chopping and mincing works of your subconscious mind you get the melting clock – it is as simple as that. Having no other choice, we attributed to allegorical genre all surrealist paintings that cannot make it to other genres, like portraits, still lifes, landscapes, genre scenes etc. What are the peculiarities of surrealist allegorical paintings? The genre is defined based on what is presented in the painting, and this classic criterion is useless when talking about surrealists. They are prolific in any genre, and the rich imagery their paintings contain could make them easily attributable to allegorical paintings. Yet by definition allegorical paintings convey ideas allusively through stories involving living creatures, objects or situations that are easy to interpret. With surrealism it’s different – you can only make assumptions as to why certain things, attributes and characteristic took a certain form or combination in the subconsiousness of the artist. Surrealists applied the same artistic techniques and principles as symbolists and realists and preserved the lifelike representation principle. What they did was revolutionize the expressive means. The composition, modeling, the perspective, light and shadow, colour scheme – every artistic principle was exploited in the best traditions of academic art and thrown at the feet of the irrational. We see alarming and absurd images and yet the masterful representation suggests that there should be something to look for in these paintings. European landscapes with African palm-trees, absurd reflexions in the mirrors, limited spaces outlined by endless archways, night lighting during the daytime, the moving quality of resting objects, gravity-free heavy things and transparency of solid objects – each artist has his own fancies, for instance Dali is recognizeable for the melting clock (distortion device or anamorphosis), the double images, stork-legged elephants, low horizons, crutchets supporting parts of human body etc. The allegorical genre in surrealism is best described by Salvador Dali: «It is the pathos of stupidity to paint an apple as it is. At least paint a worm tormented with love, and a dancing lobster with castanets, and let elephants hover over it, and you will see for yourself that an apple is absloutely redundant here».