Title: Cadavre-exquis  
Technique: Serigraphy
Dimensions: 35 x 25 cm
 
Cadáver esquisito is a French surrealist collective game invented around 1925.
 
At the beginning of the 20th century, the French surrealist movement inaugurated the method of what became known in Portuguese as cadáver esquisito (from the French cadavre exquis, i.e., delicious cadaver), which subverted the conventional literary discourse. The strange cadaver had the purpose of putting unusual words in the same sentence and using the following sentence structure: article, noun, adjective and verb. Another curiosity regarding the method is that it aggregates more than one author. Each one of them intervenes in the way he or she wishes, however, folding the paper so that the other collaborators have no knowledge of what was written.
 
The title of the game comes from the first of the known weird corpses "The weird cadaver will drink / the new wine".
 
Portuguese surrealists recovered the weird corpse, as well as other games subject to the rules of automatism and collective activity, directly from the French movement, and practised them actively, both in plastic and literary expressions, ranging from drawing to paintings of large portions, and from the simple sentence to the extensive poem. They achieved a greater richness and variety than can be found among the French surrealists,[2] as is shown, in part, by the anthology published by Mário Cesariny.