Art chronicles and essays on the visual arts in the Middle East and elsewhere: art theory, art criticism and the history of art.

The surrealist image attempts to short-circuit the distinction between the substance and the form of representation by playing upon (by both extending and contracting) the distance between the sign (or the icon as subsumed within a given significant system) and its supposed, intended or anticipated meaning. The written word as imagined in the painting of Miro is language itself finally revealed in its essential nature, namely, as a specific form of the imaginary. ...