Why the title?



Because paradoxes challenge our common sense, break our schematics and require us to think.

What’s more, they are extremely current. After quantum physics it makes no sense to speak of absolute certainties. After quantum physics paradoxes make much more sense.

Only irony remains.



Most of the photographs in the show are surrealistic.
What is surrealism for you?



Surrealism is the impossible appearing possible. A game in which the absurd appears reasonable. It’s a provocation. It’s pure magic.

In one of your surrealist photographs there’s an iron on top of a fish, specifically a ray, giving the impression that it’s being ironed.

These are associations that are produced fortuitously. For example, there’s a zebra skin in the front hall of my house—it’s the first thing I see when I open the door. One day at home I was thinking about chess, and when I saw the zebra skin the association was immediate: “What if chess pieces were placed on the zebra skin, as though the chess board had melted?”

Something similar happened to Dalí with his watches. Many people asked him, “Did the idea of soft watches come to you based on Einstein’s theory of relativity?” (A theory in which time ceases to have an absolute value). But Dalí always denied this, saying that what had inspired the image was one night he had dined on French Camembert cheese. Upon returning to the studio he looked at the painting he was working on and had an epiphany: on the branch of a tree he imagined a soft watch melting like Camembert cheese, just as he had observed a few minutes before. If Dalí hadn’t had that cheese for dessert that night, in all likelihood the idea never would have occurred to him.

Luck has given me many of my surrealistic images, but also because I happened to be in an alert and receptive state.

You have another photograph in which the claws of a crab are dialing a telephone. Why is this image so unsettling?

Because we always associate intelligence with the human and not the inhuman.



Many of the images are very poetic. How do you achieve poetry using only objects?



By depriving them of their usefulness. An object’s reason for being is its usefulness, and if you take that away it loses its meaning; the less meaningful, the more poetic it becomes. The useless is poetic, the useful isn’t.

One way of converting useful objects into useless objects is to remove them from their context. Think of the film “The Piano”—the force the piano had when it was stuck in the middle of a solitary and savage New Zealand beach. It had lost its usefulness—it doesn’t make sense, but it became so very poetic.

Any object removed from its context at a minimum produces the effect of surprise—it has greater impact than it does in its natural setting, it gains strength. I once took a large garden chess set into the mountains. When I placed the pieces on the snow the effect was shocking. Accustomed as I was to seeing the pieces in their normal, human-scale garden setting, it moved me to see them in such a grand, dramatic setting. It’s absurd to play chess on a white board of snow, but to see it there is much more poetic.



Is there a message in this show?



That we shouldn’t allow logic to delineate the possible from the impossible.

That through imagination we multiply the world.

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