Fumage
Fumage (French: smoking) is a surrealist technique invented by Wolfgang Paalen , in which the soot trail of the smoke z. B. a candle or an oil lamp is held on paper or canvas. Paalen presented the first fumage with the title Dictated by a Candle at the International Surrealism Exhibition in London in 1936. In the same year he created his first oil painting based on the fumage, Pays interdit (Forbidden Land). With his fumages, Paalen made his breakthrough in Paris in 1936. In 1940, in exile, he surprised the New York art world at the Julien Levy Gallery .
The traces of fire and smoke thus entered the circle of comparable techniques developed by colleagues such as Max Ernst or André Masson, where random structures ignite the imagination of the artist and viewer. In Surrealism, it is more the rule that the soot of the fumage occurs in conjunction with oil painting, the bright colors of which complement their own, sometimes intense, gray levels.
Salvador Dalí also used fumage in this sense , calling it " Sfumato ". In a decidedly non-figurative visual language, Fumage is encountered again around 1960 in the works of artists such as Yves Klein , Burhan Dogancay , Jiří Georg Dokoupil and Otto Piene .
