Figueres, 29 November,1999.
A 24-metre cypress tree, from within which water will gush forth onto a piano, forms the monument which the architect Òscar Tusquets has designed in homage to Salvador Dalí. With a budget of 40 million pesetas, building work on it will start very soon at the southern entrance to Figueres, and it will be presented in the course of the year 2000. Òscar Tusquets, who is a life patron of the Gala-Salvador Dalí Foundation, defined the project with these words:
"This fountain is not to the work of Salvador Dalí, but a monument to his person, commissioned by the Gala-Salvador Dalí Foundation, the institution's donation to the city on the occasion of the 25th anniversary of the inauguration of the Dalí Theatre-Museum.
The idea is therefore to allude to his work, without aiming at directly mimetic reproduction of a particular painting, but rather making a creative interpretation of one of the obsessions of Dalí's oeuvre.
His obsession for cypress trees, impossible cypress trees. This is an obsession that gave rise to many works by the Master, and more specifically to a corporeal work: the cypress tree growing out of a boat, near the entrance to his house in Portlligat. An impossible cypress tree, inherently surrealist, like the one with a white horse or a strange trumpet coming out of it, or the one from which a fountain emerges, or the one that emerges from a grand piano, and so forth, all of them imagined and painted by Salvador.
A big cypress tree, a twenty-four-metre cypress tree, on a scale to match the great roundabout upon which it is set.
A cypress tree which is realistic enough so that, from a distance, it confounds us by its measurements: is it a sculpture or a real cypress tree?
A cypress tree from which water emerges, water that falls on a piano, a piano that is flooded until it overflows from its curved side and over its keyboard, on a pond, a pond trapped by the crater formed by the grand piano as it emerges from the slate circle of Cadaqués that now surrounds it.
In fact, this interpretation is not so very far from the one I made 24 years ago, when I turned Mae West's face into one of the rooms at the Museum in Figueres. In its day, that work enjoyed the enthusiastic complicity of the Master, which is why I make so bold as to imagine that this work would also prove worthy of his approval."
