Among the most talented artists of the surrealist movement, Oscar Dominguez painted "L’Hirondelle de l’eau" (The Water Swallow) in 1938, at the peak of his career.
Originally from the Canary Islands, he discovered Paris and its nightlife in 1927, as part of his father's business affairs, as he was a wealthy agricultural trader. Upon returning to Tenerife, he exhibited his first paintings at the end of 1928, and the following year, he met André Breton in Paris. Despite failure and criticism, young Oscar Dominguez continued to paint, exhibiting his first surrealist paintings in Tenerife in 1932. He was noticed by Domingo Lopez Torres and Edouardo Westerdahl, the main theorists of what was called "the surrealist faction of the Canaries," and founders of the Gaceta de Arte magazine. Through Dominguez, Breton and Benjamin Péret were invited to Tenerife in May 1935 by Gaceta de Arte and described the island as pure fantasy, due to the exuberance of its vegetation and the magic of its mountains. They came to present an exceptional surrealist exhibition, bringing together works by Arp, Bellmer, Brauner, de Chirico, Dali, Duchamp, Max Ernst, Giacometti, Maurice Henry, Valentine Hugo, Marcel Jean, Dora Maar, Magritte, Mirò, Méret Oppenheim, Picasso, Man Ray, Styrsky, and Dominguez. Dali and Buñuel's film "L'Âge d'or" was screened on this occasion. It was in September 1936 that he finally settled permanently in Paris due to the Spanish Civil War, and he then participated in all the group's activities, notably the Surrealist Exhibition of Objects at the Charles Ratton gallery. In 1938, he participated in the International Surrealist Exhibition organized by Breton and Éluard at the gallery des Beaux-Arts. Described by Breton as "the surrealist island," Dominguez's art, emerging from a overflowing insular imagination, is the most uncontrollable and wildest of surrealism. Nicknamed by the poet "The Dragon Tree of the Canaries" in reference to this endemic tree, Dominguez is a colossus whose imagination draws its source from the reminiscences of his childhood spent in Tenerife.
"The Water Swallow" (lot 21) immerses us in this dreamlike universe, borrowed from "Dalí-esque" references, where we find the themes and elements dear to the painter: the metamorphosis of objects and plants, the stretching of organic forms and objects, carnal desire, the obsession with certain objects like the siphon, found in several compositions and objects, notably a mannequin from which a jet of fabric emanates, wrapping around its body in the context of the large surrealist exhibition the same year at the gallery des Beaux-Arts in Paris (Mannequin n° 11). Breton describes the Canarian painter who, "with a movement of the arm as undirected and as rapid as that of the window cleaner or the worker who, the house finished, initials this glass with Spanish white, but his brush conveying coup after coup several colors, has succeeded on his canvases in defining new spaces that he only had to outline and stoke to transport us to these places of pure fascination where we have not found ourselves since as children we contemplated in books the color image of meteors."
According to the correspondence of Oscar Dominguez preserved at the Tenerife Espacio de las Artes, the dedication "to Lili the little water swallow" is addressed to Marcelle Ferry, a poet close to Desnos and Breton with whom he had a romantic relationship from 1936 to 1938. It was during these years that Marcelle Ferry devoted herself to writing an unpublished autobiography entitled "Living with the Swallows." The work would be included in the collection of Dominguez's close friend, Marcel Jean, with whom he had collaborated on a famous series of decalcomanias.
