The first pictures after 1932 should be seen as an attempt to restate the question as to the reality of the image. Nothing in them points to absolute or relative plastic forms such as we find in the works of members of the Abstraction-Création group at that time, who were trying to overcome geometric purism with biomorphic natural forms and references to machine aesthetics. Paalen argued that painters should not let themselves be deceived by any metaphysical search for sublime origins in pure forms. The starting point is nothing but contingence and indifferent possibility, out of which complex and meaningful formations can develop. His paintings don’t say anything about the origins of a thing because they are opposed to a mind which thinks it knows what something is if it is acquainted with its origin and presumes to derive the actual value and sense of a thing from the meaning of this origin. The moment which Paalen shows in his paintings neither rises from a substantial beginning, nor does it reach an accomplished end. One is not able to recognise or even surmise anything but culmination of a movement in which out of decay something new comes into being, and recognising this, one will also see that it is thinking itself which recognises in this resemblance its own movement.
 

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