Salvador Dalí

SALVADOR DALÍ I DOMÈNECH (Figueras, Girona, 1904 - 1989).
"Les rinden les machines fosfèniques". Series "Les caprices de Goya", 1973-1977.
Drypoint engraving, copy 19/200.
Signed and justified by hand. Titled in plate.
Measurements: 23 x 17,5 cm (printed); 44,5 x 31,5 cm (paper).

This work, belonging to the series "Les caprices de Goya",is part of one of Dalí's most significant creative operations during the seventies: the surrealist re-reading, appropriation and metamorphosis of the great masters. Between 1973 and 1977, Dalí intervened the plates of twenty-three prints of the Goyaesque Caprichos, not as a mere reinterpretation, but as an exercise in visual alchemy, where the historical matrix becomes the support for a new iconography marked by his paranoiac-critical imaginary.

In this print, the Goyaesque figure is transformed by the irruption of an ascending spiral, a recurring symbol in Dalí's iconography, associated both with creative energy and altered states of perception. The title, alluding to the "phosphenic machines", refers to Dalí's interest in internal visions, the physiology of perception and the exploration of images produced by light stimuli, a field that the artist turned into a bridge between science, mysticism and psychoanalysis.

On the one hand, the work preserves the echo of Goya, integrating itself into a graphic tradition of enormous prestige; on the other, it is a paradigmatic example of Dalí's capacity to resignify the past, grafting onto it symbols, theories and obsessions of his own.