Surrealism according to Starck

An extract from the book "Impression d'Ailleurs" Editions de L'Aube by Philippe Starck with Gilles Vanderpooten

"The legacy of surrealism is interesting: the possibility making reality absurd was very liberating and fertile. The tension, the explosion, the spark from this telescoping is brilliant. We can find it in the example of quartz when pressed to obtain electricity. If you rub two stones together that are completely contradictory, a third element will spring from it.

The interest of surrealism is that it’s "funny". It is a good entry ticket for poetry, distancing, putting into perspective, in reality and humor, rebellion, subversion...

You could say that I am employing "neo-surrealism" when I use styles that don't match together or objects that shouldn't be where they are. These are like the alarm clocks I call "fertile surprises". Traps are premeditated so that the routine eye is awakened by an anomaly. Since I don't consider cultural characteristics, I don't care: I can do anything. I am very free in my creation. In my work process there naturally appears a catalog of anachronisms, incongruities, which I use as I go along. My only talent is that my catalog does not come from nowhere and if all is well, it is not by chance. It stems from an underlying strategy, a desire, a premeditation of the effect on the other.

In surrealism, we can observe an optical effect, subjectivities, a feverish state, or even over-sensitivity. But the real, despite its essence of an improbable cocktail which is agitated in all directions, oriented more or less askew, is interesting enough not to need to imagine in vain a more-than-real."

Ph .S