"Dualite" By Giorgio de Chirico (1888-1978), etching, 1971.

Examples of surrealism aren't exactly hard to find in present-day America. Consider Legacy Village on Cleveland's East Side. In a style of post-indoor mall shopping commonplace around LA, the stores pretend they're part of a mythically wealthy village, somewhere long ago and far away. Leased SUVs can dock near upscale goods while their drivers play platinum-card pirate in a fantasy of limitless, guilt-free consumption. It's the unconscious realm of the suburbs, dreaming improbable architectural follies, fueled by plentiful, pretty-good pizza. Sooner or later you wake up, of course, and take the bus (if you can find one) back to the land of crumbling infrastructure where real pirates seem to have sunk the economy before they sailed away.

But what the heck. Last Wednesday I went to Legacy Village and enjoyed it. I like to channel-surf reality as much as anyone. Plus a fake shopping village is just the right kind of place to find an honest-to-god blue-chip fine-arts emporium like Contessa Gallery, which was my destination. Art has no proper place in real reality anyway. Isn't that the whole point - to produce something useless, lovely, horrible and somehow true, then insinuate it onto the shelves and into the display cases of daily commerce? To plunk down real live art — especially classic surrealist art - smack in the middle of an imitation market town is exactly the right thing to do, not least because nothing says surrealism these days like a hefty line of credit.

Certainly it's a gesture that the great jester-chameleon, trickster figure Salvador Dali would have enjoyed to the tips of his famous mustache. The exhibit Kandinsky to Dali & the art of the avant-gardes is a first-rate, fascinating and meaty selection of small sculpture, huge tapestries and works on paper selected for sale by Chistine Argillet from the seminal Argillet Collection. Besides several dozen large and small prints by Dali, many of them hand-colored, there are several surprising and impressive names on the wall, attached to prints of genuine merit. A group of lithographs by Giorgio de Chirico are especially impressive, including one titled "Sole et Mare." Highlighted with light tints of yellow and blue, it shows a frantically vibrating abstract creature, like a bright pinwheel with tentacles, shining in the darkness of a doorway in a house near the sea. A hose-like attachment undulates from beneath it, snaking down the beach and out across the water until it reaches its double, the shadow of a setting sun, twirling on the horizon. The sun, lurking like an anarchist or an artist in a place it can't belong, pumps its darkness out to a spectral, public twin, setting up a circuit of identity that is at once a distraction and an advertisement, a suicide and a celebration.

More astonishing still as a parable of creative process is the centerpiece of the Contessa exhibit, a large Aubusson tapestry commissioned in the early 1970s by Dali and his long-time patron and friend, the publisher and collector Pierre Argillet. One of only eight ever completed, Contessa owner Steve Hartman says the 10-by-8-foot work was woven by a team of three or four master craftsman over a period of a year. The image was one of 13 chosen by Dali to be translated into wool. Two other Aubusson versions of Dali prints are on display at the Contessa exhibit, but "Argus" is the most impressive. A print of the large hand-colored etching on which it is based is also on view, a tour de force featuring Dali's characteristically nervous, vibrating lines. Enlarged in the weft of the tapestry, Dali's drawing gains mythic presence and surprisingly loses very little of its delicate force. An essay in the catalogue "The Argillet Era" available with this exhibit explains that Argus was a hundred-eyed creature of early Greek lore. When Zeus seduced the human woman Io, he turned her into a cow to hide her from his consort Hera's jealousy and set Argus to watch over her. Hera however persuaded Hermes to destroy the monster. Afterwards she bestowed Argus' eyes on her favorite bird, the peacock, and this event is the subject of Dali's fantasy. In keeping with the hyper-intense focus and hallucinatory combinations of his "paranoid-critical" compositional method, Dali re-imagines the scene: The peacock's tail has received an infusion of new DNA from the matron of the universe. As they explode across the upper three-quarters of the tapestry, the arching feathers take the form of a double helix - sweeping parabolas crisscross in waves, and at each intersection a human eye is suspended like a fly in a spider web. A nude woman on the lower left is Io, stepping gingerly out of her cow suit; rumpled at her feet the loose skin merges with other debris, including the headless body of Argus himself; leftover eyes are scattered here and there, and two figures near the center seem to be spectators. They lie on the grass and watch the transfiguration as if it were a fireworks display.

Or maybe the price tag knocked them off their feet. The masterwork is quite possibly a bargain at $500,000, but it's not in everyone's budget.

That's not the only case of sticker shock in the show, although it's the most extreme. Works by Hans Arp, Leonor Fini, Hans Bellmer and Wassily Kandinsky hang on temporary walls and in a series of intimate, booth-like spaces deployed along the margins of the gallery. None of these artists are likely to be encountered except under the watchful eye of a museum guard anywhere between Lyndhurst and New York's Upper East Side.

You really can't blame the gallery for locating its major showroom along the quaint, now five-year-old cobblestone streets. Legacy - legacy? - Village has proved to be a very profitable location, and anyway, Contessa's original, smaller space on Playhouse Square is still in operation, though no longer the favored location for major exhibits. "We really believe in downtown," Hartman insists, and I believe him. After all, a few years ago it was Contessa Gallery that joined with Cleveland Public Art to bring the great contemporary sculptor Louise Bourgeoise's enormous bronze spiders to downtown's Star Plaza for a too-brief, two-month-long visit. Like it or not, that was one of the more mind-bending gifts — a legacy of sorts — anyone has given the city lately, incomparably more interesting than much public sculpture, which if anything tends to overstay its welcome.

Kandinsky to Dali & the art of the Avant-Gardes: Contessa Gallery, Legacy Village, 24667 Cedar Rd., Lyndhurst, 216.861.9280.