Fumage

Fumage is a surrealist art technique popularized by Wolfgang Paalen in which impressions are made by the smoke of a candle or kerosene lamp on a piece of paper or canvas. Paalen´s first Fumage Dictated by a Candle was presented 1936 in the International Surrealist Exhibition in London. In the same year Paalen painted his first oil based on the fumage, "Pays interdit" ("Forbidden Land"). Several other Surrealists as Roberto Matta, but also Salvador Dalí later utilized the technique, Dali calling the technique "sfumato". The technique has been utilized by several artists such as Yves Klein, Burhan Doğançay, Jiri Georg Dokoupil, Otto Piene, Antonio Muñiz, Bimal Banerjee, Hugh Parker Guiler, Steven Spazuk, Zeta Paitaridou and Adam Blakemore.

Guiler's usage of the fumage technique is depicted briefly in the 1987 film Henry and June and his fumage pictures were often used as the covers for his wife Anaïs Nin's books.

Scholar Mary Flanagan compared the technique to the reading of tea leaves and to the Rorschach test. José Antonio Pérez Esteban's 2013 doctoral thesis analyzes fumage art, especially "soot paintings" by Jiri Georg Dokoupil. (Link Thesis)

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