Abstrait Lausanne is an important, rare and wonderfully exuberant painting with a compelling visual and conceptual ambiguity that evokes the dream-like imagery the Surrealists were starting to explore during this period. Quivering playfully on the threshold between figuration and abstraction, it is an image that powerfully asserts its own pictorial reality, vitality and logic.

The pictorial elements - which have a distinctly cosmic, celestial character - are set within or on top of a yellow ground, in an undetermined setting disconnected from everyday time and space. It is an image that manages to simultaneously evoke the feeling of a present-moment flash of inspiration or revelation, as well as a sense of deep time, of eternity. Regardless of the duration of the time-span evoked, it is above all a painting about freedom. The star motifs are reminiscent of Miro’s later 1920s ‘dream cycle’ paintings, as indeed is the entire spirit of the work: the lightness of touch, the diffused composition, and the evocation of the realm of the unconscious. The wave-like elements add to the feeling of eternity, and lend the work an inbuilt sense of rhythm and repetition, and the prominent spiral element (which calls to mind Robert Smithson’s seminal Spiral Jetty (1970)) further adds to the spirit of introspective motion or enquiry, and elegantly doubles as a question mark.

Abstrait Lausanne was most probably painted circa 1918, though it is undeniably something of an outlier stylistically when seen in the context of Picabia’s other (more mechanically-themed) works from this period. Accordingly it represents a rare and important moment (a true flash of inspiration) in his work, and is especially important when considered as a precursor to Miro’s 1920s paintings. The work has been widely exhibited in major museum shows across the world and notably was once part of the personal collection of Simone Collinet, the wife of prominent Surrealist André Breton, and who played an important but long overlooked role as a collector and dealer from the early 1920s onwards.