Montse Aguer (Director of the Dalí Museums), Carme Ruiz González (Chief Curator of the Fundació Gala-Salvador Dali)
www.salvador-dali.org, 2020
The surrealist Dalí landscape is real and dreamlike, photographic and melancholic, specific and paranoiac at the same time. Through the landscape he reflects in his works, we can outline Dalí's surrealism which he defines, following André Breton, as: "Surrealism: psychic automatism, by means of which it is proposed to express, be it through writing, verbally or in any other way, the real functioning of thought; of the dictation of thought in the absence of any type of aesthetic or moral control". This offers a foray into the subconscious so vindicated by Freud, which Dalí presents in a precise manner with a dose of reality and even hyperreality.
The painting Man with His Head Full of Clouds is the metaphorical work that opens the exhibition. In this case, a man integrated into the landscape and into the sky. A man-window who offers us an opening to the exterior, combining the subconscious with a more tangible reality. The 12 oil paintings by Dalí in this show enable us to engage with the "enigmatic elements" and the landscapes which make his works so unique, arousing curiosity and attraction. These landscapes provoke. They allow us to talk about apparatus, perspectives, and elongated shadows, of the concepts of visible-invisible, cypresses, fetishist Surrealist objects, spectres and ghosts, of Freud and psychoanalysis, of perception and the ability to look. About open readings with multiple meanings, which always require the participation and the gaze of the spectator to set them off. We are talking, in short, of the Surrealism of Salvador Dalí, a surrealism which extends throughout his artistic career and which we wish to highlight with Poetry of America, an eclectic, classic, and surrealist work.
Download the dossier of the exhibition with academic articles by Montse Aguer, director of the Dalí Museums, and Carme Ruiz, curator chief of the Fundació-Gala-Salvador Dalí.
