Surrealism

In 1934, Jacqueline Lamba joined the Surrealist group. Her painting, which already displayed Symbolist tendencies, gave presence to dreamlike visions, while never forgetting Jacqueline’s love for geometric forms — particularly non-Euclidean geometries. She belonged to the younger generation of artists who, as André Breton noted in a 1939 article for Minotaure, “markedly returned to automatism.” Her work can thus be compared to that of Oscar Dominguez, Gordon Onslow Ford, and especially Roberto Matta.

Unfortunately, very few of her works from this intense period have survived to the present day. They mostly consist of objects, collages, and collective drawings, in which one can already detect a tendency toward abstraction — a hallmark of her later artistic production. Among the rare paintings that have survived, the most interesting date from her early years in the United States, from 1942 to 1944. During this time, Jacqueline Lamba brought fractal forms to life in her painting: that is, crystals, prisms, polyhedra, and all kinds of forms that unfold in the third and fourth dimensions—the only dimension possible for the artist: that of the human psyche. The objects painted by Jacqueline Lamba are the result of light condensing in space. They are rendered in silvery whites, almost transparent, or in fluorescent colors that sparkle on the canvas.

In her 1944 Painting Manifesto, written for her first solo exhibition at the Norlyst Gallery in New York, Jacqueline Lamba defined the five essential elements of her art: method, form, light, space, and object. She concluded her statement by saying: “The secret would be to capture each form in its light on canvas—that is, at the precise moment when light becomes form. It would be like seeing a rainbow in the middle of the night.”

Few remember today that this type of painting — born of Surrealist automatism but soon veering toward abstraction — had a profound influence on the young American artists who became the main figures of what would later be known as Abstract Expressionism.