Week #2, Unbearable Lightness II

Dusti Bongé, Untitled (Surrealist Figures with Orange Splatter), 1950, watercolor on paper, 11 ¾” x 9”.

Another one from the weird and wonderful surrealist Keyhole People series. In the late 1940s and early 1950s, Dusti Bongé created this extensive series that eventually set the stage for her increasingly abstract work.

The shift to abstraction is directly manifested in the Keyhole figures themselves. Although their forms are vaguely reminiscent of humans, or sometimes animals, they have been reduced to just a few bare elements that suggest familiar body parts like limbs, or heads, or eyes. Their proportions are often completely at odds with anything realistic.

But the shift to abstraction is also clear from the techniques Dusti employed in a lot of these works. For one, she applies her various paints, or watercolors in these pieces, in unexpected ways, through applying them without regard of what they are actually coloring. Hence, the Keyhole figures might be green, yellow, blue, white, or orange, their color is immaterial to their basic essence and much more important compositionally. It’s the distribution of colors and how they interact that matters most.

Secondly, she avails herself of contemporary approaches like splattering paint with seeming abandon, when in her earlier surrealist works she would use stippling and other patterns much more carefully.

Finally, the figure and the ground’s respective colors all seem equally important. Thus, the figures might recede, and the ground may become dominant, whatever works in the overall composition.

You can see that all exemplified in this work. The two main figures are dark with fuzzy black coloring within black outlines. Teal accents brighten up these creatures that vaguely allude to humans, or at least bipeds. They are set against the pale background of the paper, but then they themselves are relegated toward the back by the very bright teal, yellow, white, and orange stipples and splatter that not only surround them but in fact subsume them.