Arizona Dream: Maxime Rossi Meets Max Ernst

This essay analyses the 22:40 minute video Real Estate Astrology (2015) of Maxime Rossi (born in 1980), a contemporary artist's response to the life and work of the German born surrealist Max Ernst. Rossi sets out in this vide, produced in the color filter technique of anaglyph projection, to search for Ernst’s traces in Sedona, Arizona. The surrealist artist lived here in exile together with his wife, the American painter Dorothea Tanning, from 1946 to 1953. Maxime Rossi shows a predilection for historical artists, whose works he uses as a point of departure in his work, in which historical facts and fiction are inextricably overlapping. In Sedona, Rossi goes to the places Max Ernst is said by locals Rossi has met several times to have visited: a hut where the surrealist is said to have spent the night from time to time, a stick that is said to have belonged to him, a cave with prehistoric mural paintings that he is said to have seen. Eventually, Ernst’s horoscope is said to have predestined a particularly fertile time for him in Arizona. But as we will see, all the tracks prove to be intentionally misplaced traces that confront the viewer with a hallucinatory world that mixes the real with the unreal, historical facts with the fictitious. What ultimately results is a hybrid whole that incorporates different sources and materials and oscillates between the banal and the fantastical, and between fiction and reality. And in doing so, he follows surrealist esthetics and strategies of alienation as we find them especially in Ernst’s collage works. A trans-epochal dialogue between the historical conditions of Ernst’s exile on the one hand, and the actual present on the other, runs through Real Estate Astrology, giving us two periods within the unit of the video.