Pays interdit

Pays interdit (Forbidden Land) is a surrealist painting by Wolfgang Paalen, originally called L´upyre, which in the final version of 1937 shows a drop-shaped stylized idol of femininity with tentacle-like arms, that stands in precarious proximity to an abyss opening unexpected in dark-crystalline forms to the observer.

[1] Paalen later commented on the depressions which he could finally channel into a proper furor of creation resulting in some of his best works of the surrealist period: "It was as if the fire, or the germ to it, collapsed into itself, and in its place all that is terrible comes to the fore.

Paalen designs his personal model of the permeable surreal soul-image in the form of a fragmented landscape, pulsating with a mixture of feminine mysticism and romantic shudder, reminiscent of pre-Celtic fairies and their cosmic allusions as they are known from the lyrical tradition of Brittany.

Even unintentionally, she embodies the navel of the world where the past and the future are touching, a unity of womb, uterus and mother, or as James Joyce described it: "Heva.

[5] Delphi is devoted to the earth goddess Gaia (from "delphos" – Greek womb), and with her oracle, once reconfigured by the female priestess Pythia, was surely one of the dream places on the inner map of the artist, looking for deep symbols for birth and linguistic forms for an original femininity communicating directly from the uterus.

(...) And he calls one queen, since she can not hide herself; Her tall figure turnes every branch of a tree under which she stands, into a floriferous homage; (...) / time is to him invasion of space / and is to be measured according to the number of comets that hit upon her element, that made her visible and luminous, that consumed and nourished her.

"[6] The fertility symbolism of the figure and the larger, transparent one of the three spheres with the enclosed allusions for earth, femininity, erosion and an enfolding pre-birth space stand together in a compositional harmony, hieratically floating in front of the impenetrable thicket of the terrestrial abyss.