dali fever forever
i moustache you a question… what IS it about dali?!
i have thought long and hard about this question - and why i am so incredibly fascinated by his work. so let’s think this through together…
maybe it is simply that, like everyone, i am plainly in awe of his flawless technique and mastery of oil painting.
maybe i’m infatuated with the dream-like tales he carves out in his paintings, where a peculiar, often dark colour palette is coupled with mesmerisingly bizarre lines and shapes.
or maybe it is just his staggeringly complex visual language through his detailed symbols highlighting his passion in psychoanalytical theories on the subconscious; on the access into another realm of the mind, an access to an alternative reality.
maybe it is this uncomfortable feeling he leaves us with — where we find ourselves sitting on the edge of admiration and disturbance, beauty and fright, reverie and reality…
maybe he touches that tender, unexplored part of our psyche that we have not yet dared to encounter…
or maybe… i’m overthinking all of this and it is nothing other than an awkward fascination with his impeccably-groomed moustache inspired by the great diego velasquez, and i am left in an interesting midway state between confusion and admiration for the man and his unwavering self-belief. okay, surely it’s more than that.
a dali painting to me is completely unintelligible, yet so full of meaning. the feeling of a dali painting is… an iron elk wrapped in sticky aluminium foil under a field of orchids. or perhaps a tourmaline stone lazily floating around in the control room of a decrepit submarine. a glossy chandelier slow-dancing in a lilliputian barrel of cherry petroleum gas. it is a visual dictionary of oxymorons, an encyclopaedia of metaphors. it is a dream: it is nothing one will understand in this life while being obstructed by the confines of the rational mind, yet it calls upon a much deeper part of ourselves, one which we can merely grasp yet one which summons us in the most puzzling of ways.
a dali painting to me smells like freedom and tastes like mystery. admiring one of his paintings is like sitting on the edge of a precipice, i find myself being fascinated by the breath-taking view from the top, while simultaneously experiencing a constant sentiment of terror and unease. my eyes are bouncing from different areas of the painting, where cryptic narratives lure me in, attempting to whisper secrets about another form of reality, another, mysterious intangible dimension.
what is a dali painting to you? how does it make you feel?
if we pass through the feelings of unease and perplexity, can salvador truly teach us something about our deepest selves, about the world around us, about the world within…?
i do know the answer to that question, but i think i’ll shave it for later…
