Invisible Man

The idea and the first sketch of "The Invisible Man" appeared at Dali during a vacation. Father expelled Salvador from the house and disowned him, seriously opposing the son of all the inhabitants of his native city. For some time, Dali and Gala lived in Paris, where they were able to earn some money. It was the time of Gala's daily city tours with a folder of drawings made by Dali. She knocked on the doors of patrons - and offered new works to her lover-genius. In a word, she performed the duties of a personal sales agent. Having earned some money, Gala and Dali, who had just recently begun to live together, left Paris for a small town near Marseille - to rest, sleep, read, draw - and spent there two months in the end.

It is here that Dali (and the best images and ideas always visited him during the siesta) invents a paranoid artistic move - dual images. This is an image in which one object can be perceived first, through it - a completely different one. The outlines of the subject, without actually changing, in the eyes of the beholder turn into something completely different.Horse - into a lying naked woman, and then into a lion. A vase of fruit - in the face of the poet Lorca. The Invisible Man, the first picture in a series of "dual images", is simply crammed with such puzzling visual riddles. The torso of a woman — and he is the man’s shoulder, the horse — and she is a lying woman, who threw her hand behind her head. Water - hair - horns. In such pictures-puzzles, Dali does not limit the viewer's imagination - and encourages him to see even what he himself did not mean. The more crazy figures inside other crazy figures you find, the more truly the artist’s plan will be fulfilled.

Simple drawings with visual riddles were Dali's favorite pastime when he was a child:
“Every Saturday came a youth magazine, which my father wrote for me. On the last page there was always printed a riddle in the form of a picture, on which, for example, a hunter was depicted in the forest. In the interweaving of branches and grass of the undergrowth, the artist deftly hid a rabbit. He needed to be found. Or it was necessary to find a doll that the baby lost in the seemingly empty room. This puzzle was first shown to me by my father; how he was surprised every time when instead of one rabbit I found two, three, and even four, and instead of one doll hidden by the artist, several. Even more surprising was the fact that my rabbits or dolls were visible much better and traced much more clearly than those that were specially hidden. ”

The adult Dali artist generously starts painting with rabbits and dolls, explicit, securely hidden, obvious and not very. For what? First of all, he plays with pleasure: he exercises the brain (he himself has long claimed that this is the most ingenious brain) in search of connections, and his hand in an impeccable multi-valued drawing. And, besides, it feels reality for strength, with passion excites the most reliable and strong bricks from its base - those that are responsible for the coherence of the picture and the validity of the elements that appear on it. Finally, with delight, he stretches the amount of time that the viewer will have to spend in front of his picture in search of clues. To look wider, to look in all eyes, to find rabbits and dolls, which even he himself had not noticed at first. Turn into an accomplice.

Author: Anna Sidelnikova