The painter and poet Alice Rahon (1904-1987), born in the Frenchregion of France-Comté, invented a fictitious birth date and place (1916, Brittany). A nomad-artist, she travelle across India, Lebanon and Cuba.
In Paris, she met Breton, Man Ray, Picasso and Eluard. She and her husband the Austrian artist Wolfgang Paalen were part of the group of Surrealists. In 1939, in the company of her friend and patron, photographer Eva Sulzer, they travelled from Alaska all the way to Mexico to discover the "totemic landscapes" of the Native Americans.
Upon an invitation from Frida Kahlo, they moved to Mexico... the morose grandeur of this high plain where death is always more present than life, its singular quality of an asteroid...

Influenced by the vibrant local colours, she became a painter. She sought out the magic breath in rock paintings and totemic objects, sought to reach shamanic knowledge... in order to witness the appearance of spirits and forms. She created poem-paintings, combining in a single work two different types of expression - one of images and the other writing.
"Her place in the history of Mexican art, between Surrealism and the beginning if abstract art, remins ill-defined, but her explorative, innovative side ensures that her art will last". (Nacy Deffebach)