You can easily tell the difference between a surrealist still life and that of a realist, romanticist or impressionist. The objects are weird, and they are combined in the way that it is even hard to call it a still life. What’s the story behind these paintings? Let’s dig in. By the rules of the genre still life should feature inanimate objects.

As for surrealism, instead of representing objects per se, the artists convey the way they are viewed in the twilight states of mind, the images and associations the objects trigger in dreams, hallucinations, memories, illusions and fixed states. A real object is different from its surrealist counterpart. A real object has some integral stable characteristics – it is either soft or hard, transparent or solid, it has 1-2-3 legs, a specific colour and is usually seen together with other objects, say a plate next to a glass, a chair next to a table. It’s all predictable and down-to-earth simple. The surrealists highlighted and brought forward the absurdity of our reality; they defied the laws, principles and patterns as shallow and conventional and looked for absurd links between objects and phenomena. The surrealist vision of the world denies the mastermind that rules the universe, and the consistency of the latter. Therefore their canvases reveal all conflicts and contradictions confined in seemingly rational things; the rational world is turned upside down and inside out, broken down into pieces and assembled in a most chaotic fashion. That’s why we see heavy things hovering in the air, solid things melting, an umbrella makes a stand for a glass of water rather than protecting you from the water, a paintings featuring a smoking pipe gets the name of “This is not a pipe”, real objects sit next to unreal, things far away are pictured as being close, and one thing turns to another when looking at it closely. Surrealists use formal artistic devices characteristic of realist and symbolist, but they mix and match them to irrationalize the line, the drawing, the light and shadow principles, the colour and perspective etc.