A major figure in Surrealism, André Masson developed an artistic practice from the 1920s onward based on automatism, the exploration of the unconscious, and the free association of forms. From 1927, he transposed these explorations to sculpture, a medium still largely excluded from Surrealist experimentation, deemed too slow and too restrictive to translate the spontaneous movements of thought. With Amoroso, created in 1939, the artist pushed this approach to its extreme, giving sculptural form to his reflections on instinct, desire, and metamorphosis.The work is situated within a period of profound transformations within the Surrealist movement, notably marked by a split during the 1930s, with Masson distancing himself from André Breton and aligning himself with Georges Bataille and Michel Leiris. This convergence occurs due to shared conceptions regarding concerns about eroticism, sacrificial violence, and the primordial forms of existence. In this intellectual context, the human body becomes, for Masson, a territory of metamorphosis, where the boundaries between beings, sexes, and the kingdoms of life blur. The erotic impulse, far from being limited to a representation of desire, becomes a transformative force, capable of destabilizing individual identity.
In Amoroso, two entwined figures merge into one another, joined by their genitals, their heads, and a shared hand. Their bodies, difficult to separate, compose a whole of ambiguous forms, where masculine and feminine characteristics merge. Individual outlines fade in favor of a hybrid entity, permeated by an organic energy. The forms seem to emerge from a continuous movement, as if matter itself were animated by the instinctual forces that govern the figures.
This formal fluidity originates in automatic drawing, whose principles Masson transposes to sculptural practice. His sculptures often emerge from sketches on paper, created in a state of openness to the unconscious and the free flow of images. The modeling process then extends this spontaneity into the material, through a play of curves, twists, and entanglements. While automatism implies the abandonment of rational control, Masson nonetheless maintains a rigorous mastery of the plastic construction.The use of bronze, with its earthy patina, extends this organic dimension. This relationship between drawing, material, and volume testifies to Masson's singularity, who manages to make sculpture a space for experimentation comparable to that of painting and drawing. Far from being a secondary activity, his sculptural work permeates his entire oeuvre. Thus, in *L’Hôtel des automates*, a work begun in 1939, the composition revisits and extends Amoroso’s forms, inscribing the motif of the union of bodies within a universe where the living and the mechanical maintain ambiguous relationships.
Although his sculptural work is relatively small in number, with twenty-six works listed in his catalogue raisonné, it occupies an essential place in Masson’s artistic trajectory. The sculptures conceived in the 1920s and 1930s were cast in bronze several decades later. In the early 1980s, encouraged in particular by the Due Ci gallery in Rome, the artist returned to his sculptural creations and undertook the production of these casts, sometimes in enlarged dimensions. This rediscovery helped to bring to light a long-neglected aspect of his work.
Amoroso also maintains a close connection with the history of the Galerie Jean-François Cazeau. In the late 1980s, the Odermatt-Cazeau gallery financially supported the production of Masson's bronzes and dedicated a major exhibition to his sculptures in 1990 and 1991. A bronze of Amoroso was among the key works presented. This involvement testifies to the gallery's long-standing commitment to Masson's sculpture and its contribution to the recognition of this unique aspect of his work.