After his return from a trip to Prague, Bohemia and Zagan in the summer of 1937, Paalen inaugurated the totemistic segment of his oeuvre. Paalen was interested in electrifying movement in painting, and the technique that he invented, fumage, lived up to its promise fully. A fumage is a provocateur optique, the genesis of an image initiated by candle smoke. With fumage, the painter was able to confirm for himself the validity of the mythos of the Kafkaesque mind which in the painterly act retraces the imponderable trajectory of thought. Autonomous fumage experiments, either on paper or on primed canvas, are initially as important in his work as oil paintings, the fumage later becoming less of a starting point than painting with oil and brush. Fumage, as simple as it may seem in its pictorial effect, corresponds with this pneumatic-transitory context: by linking moment to moment, perceived image to perceived image, like signals, fumage resembles a discharge of purely rhythmic, i.e. temporal convergence. The moment in which the candle flame, flaring up, deposits a black spot on the canvas is, in a sense, the threshold of this equilibrium; possibility becomes reality, like a kind of quantum jump from the indeterminate position of a wave to the verifiable position of a particle.
 

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