Composición surrealista 1934

Esteban Frances painted this Surrealist Composition, sometime before 1976, using a palette of earthy tones, warm browns, and cool blues that gives it a dreamlike quality. You can see he builds up layers of paint, creating a smooth, almost porcelain-like surface. What strikes me most are the figures; their bizarre, elongated forms remind me of automatons, especially with their mechanical gestures and hollow gazes. Take the seated figure on the left, for example. The way their arm merges with the metal bar, is quite unsettling. These aren't portraits in the traditional sense, they’re symbols, perhaps of the artist's inner world, a landscape of anxieties and strange desires. Frances's work reminds me a bit of de Chirico, another artist who used architectural spaces and mannequin-like figures to create a sense of alienation. But where de Chirico's work feels static and monumental, Frances's painting is more fluid, more dreamlike. It's a reminder that art doesn't always have to make sense. Sometimes, it just needs to provoke.