Bruno F. Xavier

The Surrealist Movement as such doesn't exist anymore, does it? I don't care that that's one of the many states of the world; and, in keeping with my usual anachronistic/imaginary way of being, I proudly call myself a member of it! In truth, the longer I live, the clearer the Manifesto becomes to me and the more I agree with it from a philosophical standpoint - but I also use terms loosely, and bind myself only to that which strikes my fancy. As a self-respecting Surrealist, I follow my dreams, literally: all of my ideas come from them, facts and figures in the depictions I make often taken as "verbatim" as possible from my "unconscious adventures"; I face every sleeping session as work, then wake up and question if the latest episodes merit to be entered into the memorial I keep - to be referenced who knows when. There is not only a rich reservoir of illuminations, revelations, and incidents to be taken from shut-eye, but must also admit that I enjoy, albeit reluctantly, the challenges presented by trying to translate the dark world of such moment into feasible and exciting works of art to ours.

Given the above methodology, Atomic Torchlight can be described as the pouring out through the puzzling atmosphere that pervades our sleeping brain of the paranoia from which modern humankind suffers; and, though I draw from my own experience, making it a very personal journey, I am also aware that, as just one of billions of members of our species, in whose evolution I share, the symbology that I’m presented with to discuss and try to deal with the contemporary madness is collectively owned, built into us all. Though a breakdown can be made of all of the issues I grapple with in my art, the overarching one is “how do we deal with the existential crisis we inflict upon ourselves by knowing too much and severing our connections from sense and surroundings?”; everything else, such as “science as magic”, “disease and living death”, “arrest of imagination”, “the weight of infinity”, “the burden of past dealings”, etc. being traceable back to that one question.

I am very open to name influences, from whom I steal techniques, methods and other blueprints shamelessly; to me, the true voice of any artist emerges once one has learned how to embrace and digest one’s own influences, taking whatever one needs, then, through attention and discipline, working out the nature of what is it that the art wants one to say - regardless of whether the individual would have had it come out like that if given the choice or not. Some of my influences in the visual arts are, in half-particular order: Salvador Dalí, M.C. Escher, Hieronymus Bosch, Leonardo da Vinci, Antoni Gaudí, Gustave Doré, Marc Chagall, Gerald Scarfe, Junji Ito, H. R. Giger, Zdzisław Beksiński, and Francis Bacon.