«Everybody wants to know the secret of my success: it is called the paranoiac-critical method. I invented it more than thirty years ago and I apply it with success, although I do not yet know what it consists of. Basically, it was the most rigorous systemization possible of the most delirious phenomena and materials, with the intention of making tangibly creative my most obsessively creative ideas»
This is how Salvador Dalí explained what for many was and continues to be the mystery surrounding his artistic production. An enigma that blossoms from the subconscious and that gives it voice: this is the starting point from which the narrative thread of the exhibition “Salvador Dalí – Enigma” takes its form.
Once the paranoia and mental obsessions took over Dalí's mind, they led the artist to lose his perception of reality.
The classical parameters that pigeonhole human life lost consistency, space and time became deformed, soft, swollen, boundless and no longer reflected the sense of reality. The delirium of the irrational is thus incarnated in monstrous beings, animals, forms offering more than one interpretation, rejections of every kind. His language is not immediately understandable and, very often, does not hide a true meaning, but is only an anxiety to exceed, a compression of contrasting thrusts that seek a form, a way out.
However, at the peak of his own mental destruction the discovery of psychoanalysis came to the artist’s aid. The birth of modern psychology, thanks to Freud, provided many insights to the artistic production of the first half of the Twentieth Century. Dalí himself went on to consider Freud his spiritual father and his psychoanalytical influences and his theories of the subconscious became incorporated in his art.
The boundary between the implicit monsters in man and their surreal redemption is The dream, that psychic production that takes place during sleep and is characterised by images, perceptions, emotions that are performed in an unreal or illogical manner. During sleep, man’s control of consciousness of thought is lost and therefore his or her conscious can freely emerge, disguised by symbolic images.
And so that enigma that characterises the Dalian production dissolves into new meanings that seem to always disappear a second before we can fully understand it, leaving us, however, with a sense of newness in the mind, an inexpressible inspiration.
