Eagle Eye exists to explain the gaps—between how we dress and how we live; between the spaces you’re drawn to and the coat you keep reaching for. Each month, London-based designer and creative director Alex Eagle will tap her roster of friends and experts to explore the “why” behind a certain theme—why we’re drawn to certain things, and how those instincts quietly form over years without us really noticing. It’s a column rooted in interior design, with many branches (and, of course, a curated edit of shoppable products to boot).

The first time Surrealism made sense to me, I was quite young. Dalí’s clocks, encountered in a book or on a classroom wall, did something that purely abstract art never quite managed: they let me in. So precise, so real in their rendering, and then completely, quietly wrong. It’s reality with the dial turned just slightly, and I’ve never really recovered from it, if I’m honest. The Venice Art Biennale opened this month under the theme In Minor Keys, curated by the late Koyo Kouoh. It’s a theme that’s intimate, poetic, quietly unsettled—for me, that’s enough to send the mind back to Surrealism.

The term was originally coined in Paris in the 1920s, when the poet André Breton published his manifesto calling for art rooted in the unconscious—dreams, desire, irrationality—as a revolt against the order that had, in his view, led Europe to catastrophe. The movement that followed produced some of the most arresting images in the history of art: Dalí’s melting clocks, Magritte’s bowler-hatted men, Meret Oppenheim’s fur-lined teacup. Its relevance has never felt more immediate than it does right now, in the era of relentless optimization and algorithm-approved wardrobes. As Egyptian designer Laila Gohar, whose objects and tablescapes are among the most Surrealist-inflected pieces being made today, puts it: “Minimalism and quiet luxury is just bloody boring. People want things with a pulse again.”

If modernism, which I wrote about last month, gives permission to edit, Surrealism gives permission to dream. Delfina Delettrez, a jewelry designer whose works operate somewhere between the body and the subconscious, describes it as “desiring without logic—allowing instinct, obsession, memory, contradiction, humor, sensuality, and fantasy to enter the room.” Marie-Louise Scio, CEO and Creative Director of the Pellicano Hotels group with one of the most instinctive collector’s eye I know, frames it more simply. “Surrealism opens the door to emotion, fantasy, and the unexpected.”

Which brings me back to Venice and to Peggy Guggenheim, whose house on the Grand Canal is less museum, more layered, slightly eccentric collage. What I find so compelling about her world is how un-precious it feels: Art not kept at reverent distance, but lived amongst, brushed past on the way to lunch, set slightly askew if that’s how it felt right. That quality is what I look for now in the things I buy and the spaces I build, and I’m not alone. Gohar owns a giant silver teapot that is, she freely admits, completely unusable: too dramatic to pour from, too beautiful to put away. “I love objects that seem functional at first and then slowly reveal themselves as emotional instead,” she says. “A home should not feel so uptight.” In the end, what Surrealism offers is the freedom to hold contradictions without needing to resolve them. Not everything needs to add up. Venice, this month, feels like exactly the right place to remember that.

Shop Alex Eagle’s Guide to Surrealism:

• The Spiral Earrings: Lié Studio Ruby earrings, $300
• The Hypnotic Coasters: Sophie Lou Jacobsen spiral coaster set, $75
• The Sculptural Trousers: Alaïa triangle gabardine pants, $1,900
• The Squiggle Rug: Nordic Knots Walled Garden, $1,195
• The Fun Flatware: Lazy Jamie spiral set, $42
• The Sensory Scarf: Prada printed silk skinny scarf, $295
• The Lipstick Candle: Fornasetti Se Poi Frutto Proibito candle, $330

A Study in Juxtaposition

The most accessible entry point into Surrealism is also its most fundamental principle: taking something utterly ordinary and placing it where it has no logical right to be. A lobster on a telephone, a fur-lined teacup, a bunch of sheep in the living room; that wrongness and slight lurch of recognition is where the pleasure lives.

Start with one thing on a table or shelf that makes someone stop mid-conversation. That is where Surrealism enters the everyday—for example, a lemon squeezer that arrives at your kitchen table as three silver swans. Gohar World’s stainless steel design is both utterly functional and utterly absurd; it’s the kind of object that makes the person standing next to you at the sink do a double take. Or take the Sospesa hand-blown wine glass, with a stem so fine and a balance so unlikely that every time you reach for it, you half expect it not to be there. “There is a return to appetite and humor and distortion,” says Gohar.

Dream State Designs

“Surrealism opens hidden doors,” says Delettrez, whose work plays on the dreamlike state of access to a different world through mesmerizing shapes like swirls and spirals. “It allows instinct, obsession, memory, and fantasy to enter the room.” After all, a swirl is sort of the shape of the dream itself; what better way to bring the movement home than by pieces inhabiting this form?

You find it everywhere once you start looking. For the table, it’s the hand-blown Encalmo glass tumbler, its body threaded with ribbons of color that spiral through the glass as if trapped mid-swirl. In jewelry, Lié Studio’s Ruby earrings do something similar: three descending discs, each one a pressed concentric spiral, worn against the body like small hypnotic objects.

Distorted Silhouettes

“Honestly, almost everything I live with is emotionally and aesthetically a little ‘off’, in an interesting way,” says Scio. “My Gaetano Pesce vases are a perfect example. They feel almost alive in the room.” Dalí’s melting clock works because we know exactly what a clock is supposed to look like; the distortion only lands because the original form is so completely understood, and the same goes for fashion. Elsa Schiaparelli (who collaborated directly with Dalí) grasped that a garment could hold the same logic, that clothes could hold a joke, too.

That tradition is alive in what is being made right now. Alaïa’s triangle pants do something almost architectural, ballooning dramatically at the thigh before tapering to a precise, narrow ankle. It’s a silhouette that seems to defy the logic of how fabric should behave on a body. Bottega Veneta’s gathered jersey top takes a different approach—here, the fabric is twisted, knotted, and caught mid-movement, as if the garment is in the process of becoming something else entirely. These pieces borrows the Surrealist’s central trick: Start with something known, then push one element just far enough that the whole thing tips into dream. “The beauty comes from freedom, from unexpected combinations—be adventurous!” adds Scio. It’s a good reminder that proportion is a convention, not a law.

Sensory Exploration

Of all Surrealism’s recurring motifs, the ones that have proved most enduring are also the most intimate: the eye, the lip, and the body rendered as object and the object rendered as body. That language is as alive now as it ever was. Man Ray’s Eyeball print is one of those images that changes a room simply by being in it. Similarly, the Carl Auböck bottle stopper—a glass eye set into a gold dome, gazing up from the neck of a bottle—is functional, unsettling, and oddly beautiful.

This is what Surrealism understands about desire: It operates through the senses first, the mind second. Delettrez, whose entire body of work reflects this territory via eyes cast in gold bracelets and anatomical forms set into rings, agrees. “Surrealism is about trusting symbols before reason. For me, it has never been escapism; it’s a deeper form of truth.” That is, in the end, what all of these objects offer.