The Invisible Revealed is a fascinating exhibition of varied Surrealist works. The description “Surrealist Drawings” may not be quite appropriate for the many works in collage and other mediums like print and photography, but that is part of the show’s appeal. In fact, because the members of the Surrealist movement were highly interested in exploratory art, many experimental or unconventional techniques are used in the pieces on display. Nearly a quarter of the gallery is devoted to collage, and individual examples of innovative methods like frottage (placing an object under a piece of paper and rubbing over it to transfer the texture), decalcomania (painting on a sheet of paper with gouache and then pressing it against another piece of paper to produce two drawings) and cire (painting or drawing on a surface of wax), among others, are present as well.

One piece that stands out is “Le Jockey Perdu” by René Magritte, an artist who, though never an official member of the Surrealist group, flirted with Surrealism’s central idea of automatism (writing or drawing whatever comes to mind and deliberately suppressing rational or aesthetic judgments that may hamper the pure act of creation). He fully embraced the practice of collage, the technique used in this eerie image of a lost jockey racing through a sparse forest of musical scores.

Another piece that this reviewer was particularly struck by was “Le Grisou” by Oscar Dominguez. This piece is an example of the decalcomania technique described earlier, which was first used by Dominguez. The technique tends to blur lines and create fuzzy, nebulous shapes, and this particular work uses those effects to create a dark, dreamlike scene of a slightly distorted lion that appears to be walking through a free standing doorway into nothingness. A very beautiful piece, it is a prime example of the breadth of Surrealism, which is not best represented, as many believe, by the hectic and jarringly violent paintings of Dalí.

Indeed, the works of Dalí and those influenced by him make up a relatively small fraction of the exhibit and are easily overshadowed by the much simpler, yet more aesthetically interesting, works of artists like Victor Brauner. Brauner has a distinct style, seemingly adapted from primitive figurative drawings. His “L’Archechat”, which can be seen in the advertisements for the show, depicts a fantastic creature in bright colors with little background or context. The use of the cire technique, which Brauner pioneered, suits the flatness of the figure well, and the fine details in the wax surface, naturally uneven and scored by black lines, give the drawing a rough, unrefined quality. Brauner has by far the largest share of space in the exhibit, and deservedly so, as all of his pieces are highly imaginative and simplistically beautiful.

Also, one other remarkable section of the show is a series of drawings produced during the course of a game which the Surrealists called the cadavre exquis. They would each take a turn drawing part of a figure on one quarter of the page, then fold it over and pass it on to the next, until the page was filled and a complete drawing had been made. They worked in pencil, crayon, watercolor and even collage, and the numerous examples of the drawings produced range from cute to grotesque.