Salvador Dalí

SALVADOR DALÍ I DOMÈNECH (Figueras, Girona, 1904 - 1989).
"Personnages", c. 1958.
Graphite on tracing paper.
Attached certificate issued by Robert Descharnes and Nicolas R. Descharnes.
Measurements: 18 x 17 cm; 51 x 46 cm (frame).
This work is a revealing example of the artist's exploration of the dynamics of movement and the interaction of human figures. Executed in graphite on tracing paper, the work presents three characters that seem to participate in a dance. The composition acquires a circular form thanks to the arrangement and gesture of the bodies, which direct the viewer's gaze towards a point of visual convergence.
In the center is a female figure that seems to articulate the scene, flanked by a man on the left and another woman on the right. The characters lack precise identifying features, which gives the scene an archetypal and timeless character. Their forms, barely sketched, suggest a continuous movement rather than a static snapshot, evoking the idea of the ephemeral and the unfinished. In the upper plane, brief, gestural strokes insinuate elements that refer to a landscape or a barely suggested natural environment.
The theme of the dancers has a significant place in Dalí's production, especially in his mature period. Dalí resorted on several occasions to dance as a metaphor for vitality, eroticism and eternal return, relating body movement to the flow of the unconscious as seen in his famous sculpture "Homage to Terpsichore, the Muse of Dance" of 1977.
Painter and sculptor, Salvador Dalí was one of the greatest exponents of the surrealist movement. He made his individual debut in 1925, at the Dalmau Galleries in Barcelona. In 1926, after being expelled from the San Fernando School of Fine Arts for indiscipline, he went to Paris. There he met the young Picasso and, four years later, he joined the surrealist movement. Dalí's production in this period is based on Freud's theories, acclaimed by Breton: representation of dreamlike images and everyday objects in unsuspected and surprising compositional forms. Some of the characteristics of his work at this time became distinctive of all his later work. He also absorbed the influences of diverse artistic styles, from classical academicism to the most groundbreaking avant-garde. His work greatly influenced the direction of surrealism during the following years, being acclaimed as the creator of the paranoiac-critical method, an essential combination of the real and the imaginary. As a result of his first individual exhibition in New York in 1934, his international projection was definitively consolidated. Most of his production is gathered in the Dalí Theatre-Museum in Figueras, followed by the collection of the Salvador Dalí Museum in St. Petersburg (Florida), the Reina Sofía in Madrid, the Salvador Dalí Gallery in Pacific Palisades (California), the Espace Dalí in Montmartre (Paris) or the Dalí Universe in London.