Malaga,
His life was very brief -he said just half a century -but Óscar Domínguez knew how to achieve in that trajectory he cuts an bold style: he is the author of compositions marked by contrasts, the fusion of the real and the imaginary and the mystery. That ability to devise surprising images, its originality even in the context of the surrealist movement, led him to be recognized as one of the boldest creators of his time.
Born in 1906 in a Tenerife family dedicated to banana plantations, he moved in 1927 to Paris to expand family businesses in France and there he remained until his death. Being very young he immersed himself fully in the artistic environment of that city in the thirties and met André Breton and Salvador Dalí, who would exert a determining influence on his journey. His first individual took place in 1933, but in his land: in the Circle of Fine Arts of Tenerife, promoted by the magazine Art Gazette. The following year would be added to another circle, that of the aforementioned Breton (already publications, samples and other collective activities), and the notes of surrealism incorporated references to the landscape of his island and an accentuated symbolism in his objects.
We owe, in addition, Óscar Domínguez the invention of the “decalcomanía”, a technique consisting of introducing black liquid gouache between two surfaces, chanceing them, which he considered the maximum mechanism of automatism. Precisely the presence in his random creations, desire, black and irrational humor are studied in the anthology that the Picasso Malaga Museum now gives him, under Isidro Hernández Gutiérrez’s police station.
His work is also analyzed from the memory of the Canarian landscapes of his childhood and youth: Black sand beaches, dragos and seas of clouds that were introduced into their imaginary and that survived, both evident and symbolicly, in their work and that suppose their personal seal with respect to other surrealisms. We do not refer only to natures, but to living materials that become in their production, dreamlike images, in which lava shapes are merged with mutilated bodies and overflowing masses, interpreted as subconscious rashes. The lunar appearance of his scenarios is not casual, but a visual translation of his island, in which he set the telluric, lonely and cosmic. The drago in his compositions becomes totem, and the seas of clouds in a reason halfway between the real and the fantastic. The artist joined that Canarian mythology with the codes of European surrealism, that is, the challenge to utilitarianism and the openness towards the unforeseen and the irrational.
In Malaga we can contemplate an important set of pieces elaborated with that method of decalcomanía, which dodged the use of press and that gave rise to unexpected forms and abstract and suggestive textures, with a high visual tension derived from its organicity. For the Canarian artist, it was much more than a technical resource: it was a path to the unconscious and a lyrical tool to capture the irrational and transform it into symbolic image. He also drew cosmic landscapes on his surfaces Litocronicsa particular way of capturing the passage of time in pictorial matters through experimental textures and techniques linked to sedimentation of the course of the years.
In the German occupation of France, during World War II, Dominguez failed to exile, so, since his study in Paris, he was an active part of the clandestine networks of artistic and intellectual resistance against Nazism. Despite all the difficulties, his workshop was a meeting place for committed artists, especially for young poets of La Manin à Plumethat carried out an intense editorial activity and the sale of works of art in order to keep surrealism alive and to finance the resistant.
In that context, the ties between Óscar Domínguez and Pablo Picasso were fueled, whom he considered “the most sensational man of the time.” He attended especially to his formal and symbolic freedom, while Malaga praised empathy and volcanic and dreamlike energy of the Canary. Without that friendship we could not understand the fragmented and distorted figures present in many Dominguez compositions that combine the cubist tradition and surreal poetics.
The last decade of life of the Tenerife, that of the fifties, was difficult and unstable for him both personally and in the creative: he suffered a degenerative disease, which increased his melancholic tendency and had to do with his work desire in corporeality, introspection and symbolism.
Their more bleak language and his tones darkened, but did not lose emotional density, and did not leave aside the metamorphic forms and echoes of their past landscapes. He never abandoned surrealism, but his artifice. He died on the last day of the year 1957 in Paris.
Óscar Domínguez
Picasso Málaga Museum
C/ San Agustín, 8
Malaga
From June 20 to October 13, 2025
