Lot 328 R

The present reworked photo collage by Dalí combines techniques that were developed by the Dadaists and carried on by the Surrealists. Pop artists also made use of them. This creative, playful act leads to a hybrid photo montage in which it is no longer possible to distinguish between reality and image, illusion and phantasm. Dalí used the technique in particular to create unsettling double images. Individual motifs and depicted objects are literally multiplied, mirrored, cut apart and recombined, in order to in turn be reproduced and charged with meanings on the next level. The acts of defamiliarisation create new contexts. It is not only the subconscious and human fantasy which are set free. Viewers are immersed in and can literally “lose” themselves within the imagined images and parallel worlds - modern times!
This collage initiates one of these Dalíesque voyages of discovery. It interweaves photos and details of two famous paintings by Dalí: “Marché d'esclaves avec apparition du buste invisible de Voltaire” (1940) and “Le torero hallucinogène” (circa 1968-1970). In this way it unites central and important elements in the iconography of the Spanish artist. Through découpage, collage and modifications to the colours, the poetry of syntax and semantics is rekindled in the sketch: the contour of the dreaming melancholic as a torero, located on the right, is juxtaposed on the left with the skull of the aged Voltaire, which is based on the famous portrait bust by Houdon. Both are mirrored in powerful contrast before the sheerly unending accumulation of “woman” as such: the “Venus de Milo”.