Raymond Roussel's influence on art

The Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía (Madrid, Spain), in collaboration with the Museum of Contemporary Art Serralves (Oporto, Spain), organizes Locus Solus. Impressions of Raymond Roussel.

This is the first major exhibition to be held on the figure of the poet, novelist and dramatist Raymond Roussel (Paris, 1877-Palermo, 1933) and his artistic and literary influence on contemporary art. The title of the show refers to what are perhaps his two best-known novels, Locus Solus and Impressions of Africa.

Classed as a "difficult author" by Robert de Montesquiou, a French poet with links to the symbolist movement, Roussel left an oeuvre of poems, novels and plays without precedent in the history of literature in terms of their creative universe, abounding in spectacles, masks and phantasmagorias, and their clear and descriptive writing.

He belonged to an haute bourgeoisie nostalgic for the grandeur of the past, and he kept his distance from the avant-gardes all his life "like a man fully determined to follow no inclination other than that of his spirit", as André Breton said of him. Nevertheless, it was this group of admirers that he eventually approached in order to put his work in circulation.
Roussel's writing procedure, based on homophony and double meanings of words, gave form to an imagery that made a great impression on the most important artists of the period, such as Marcel Duchamp and André Breton. For Duchamp, Roussel was "he who points the way", going so far as to use him as the "catalyzer" for his cycle La Mariée ("The Bride"). Breton, the leader of the surrealist movement, meanwhile called the writer "the greatest magnetizer of all time".  Roussel"s influence on artistic modernity became a myth that has never ceased to grow.

Made up of about three hundred pieces, including paintings, photographs, sculptures, ready mades, installations and videos together with copious documentation (books, magazines, manuscripts and so on), this exhibition will reveal the enormous influence exerted by Roussel on various avant-garde movements, such as the surrealists. Among the exhibits are works by Francis Picabia, Max Ernst, Man Ray, Salvador Dalí, Joseph Cornell, Guy de Cointet, Rodney Graham, Allen Ruppersberg, Ree Morton, Terry Fox, René Daniëls, Cristina Iglesias and Francisco Tropa.

Date: until February 27.
Location: Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía. Santa Isabel 52, 28012. Madrid. Spain.
Opening hours: from Monday to Saturday from 10am to 9pm. Sundays from 10am to 2.30pm.