The suicide of Sonia Araquistain on 3rd September 1945 became a focal point Toni del Rezio’s final attempt to energise surrealism in England.

By 1945 all group activity by the London Surrealist Group had ceased, and Mesens’ heart was no longer in the leadership struggle with Toni del Renzio. Toni himself was worn out by his efforts to instil some life into the group. His last attempt to trigger some joint activity came following the death of Sonia Araquistain. The twenty-three-year-old daughter of a former Spanish Ambassador to Paris and London had jumped naked to her death from the roof of her home in Bayswater. At the inquest it was disclosed that she had ‘dabbled’ in psychoanalysis and read Freud, which the coroner condemned. Thinking back to the example of Violette Nozière, the eighteen-year-old French girl whose murder of her father had inspired the Paris surrealists to make a collective response, del Renzio saw the opportunity to do something similar, but the only artist to respond was his wife Ithell and the only writer to react was the Egyptian poet Georges Heinen who was then living in Paris. His poem, Sonia Araquistain was published in Les Cahiers du Sud, 1946, no. 280.

Remy (1999) reads the paintings as:

a depiction of stages in the alchemical processes of exaltation, multiplication and projection. The dovetailing of the falls of forms and the ascension of colours, of the body’s descent and the rising of essences, detaches death from its finality and plunges the viewer into pure otherness. (p. 280)

We are grateful to Richard Shillitoe