About The Author

Mariú has taken very seriously her role as a second-generation Veristic Surrealist painter. The first generation of Surrealists were a group put together by Andre Breton, a French psychiatrist who had used Freudian Theory to cure some of his patients at a neurological ward in Nantes, France, during the First World War. He felt that artists had a less pronounced wall of division between the conscious and subconscious mind and therefore could help to map the constitution of the mind.

Mariú graduated in Fine Art, Architectural Design and Decoration from Javeriana University in Bogota, Colombia, in 1966. She has done her work while constantly reading about psychoanalytical developments from Freud and Jung to James Hillman, and embracing Dali’s Paranoiac Critical Method. She understood the importance of Archetypal psychology as advanced by Jung and James Hillman. She decided to explore Jung’s theory that to understand the psyche, which speaks to us in images through dreams and visions, one has to understand the universal symbols of the collective unconscious.

Salvador Dali, one of the members of the first generation Surrealists, learning from his readings of Freud, decided that the images of the unconscious should be used by the painter as a metaphor. The artist should, like any paranoiac, allow the images of the subconscious to come to the surface to be frozen on canvas and therefore become conscious. He based his paranoiac critical method on Jung’s theory that, since in the artist the wall of intellectual interpretations separating the subconscious from the conscious are less rigid than in the rest of people, the artist should paint the images of the unconscious without judging them. Then the artist could do the philosophical work of analyzing the images to understand them. Therefore, the name: paranoiac-critical method.

Mariú has dedicated her life to following the thread of images that reach her consciousness from the unconscious and analyzing them. Beyond Homo Sapiens is her conscious thread out of the labyrinth of mistaken interpretations of those images.

Visit Mariú Suarez’s surrealist works and theories online at www.gosurreal.com.