Subrealism

The infection of Surrealism (subrealism) in the painter's and sculptor's art naturally found its way into the practice of the most universal of the arts.

But as the development of cubism and other tendencies shows, contemporary art tends to slip away into antirealist abstraction, subrealism and subjectivist creationism, obeying no laws but its own.

[…] what André Breton called a higher reality—Surrealism. Herbert Read, ironically, called it Superrealism. I would like to suggest that it is a reality of depth, not height, thus—Subrealism. The sound and light of every painter is ultimately this kind, an intensity and unity that demands the courage to dig, the tenacity to cover the distance, and the poetry to bring it to terms.

Give up surrealism that only nourishes subrealism; the two of them, along with the so-called "natural," have got a dubious stench of urinals and churches.

Whereas surrealism sought to transcend reality from above, 'subrealism' sought to 'dive through the bottom of reality.' The three artists' activities in Shimomaruko were based on this idea.

The kibyōshi picture is a kind of visual paradox in this sense, presenting the reader with the spectacle of subrealism in its sketchiness and hyperrealism in its obsessive attention to trivia drawn from everyday life.

While we wait for the necessary publication of a book about "subrealism" in the cinema, almost entirely devoted to French cinema, with an additional chapter on neo-subrealism , Shoot the Piano Player already presents us with a repertoire sufficiently stocked with the characteristic traits of the new school.

Thus the fight between socialist realism and Gulag subrealism was not a fight for a dominant artistic method or aesthetic principle, nor even for an adequate epistemological approach, but a fight for the true communist ontology.