Emotion according to Dali

In 1951, Dali painted Christ portligat (Also known as Christ Saint John of the Cross), one of his most emblematic works and One of the three wonderful Easter-related pieces in his production (which includes an extensive catalog of paintings with religious themes), besides Hyperbolic Christ (1954) d'Holy Supper (1955). Oddly enough, all three are far from where they had their creative roots: Christ portligat It is regularly exhibited at Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum in Glasgow, Scotland; the Hyperbolic Christ In Metropolitan New York. I Holy Supper Similar to the National Gallery of Art in Washington.

for this reason Big event this Easter (until April 30) One of the three members of this particular Dalian trilogy can be seen in Figueres. AccessChrist portligat The exhibition held at the Theater-Museum at the end of last October aroused tremendous anticipation, reinforced by the words of the directors of the Gala Salvador Dalí Foundation, who emphasized that it was one of the most important exhibitions they had ever organised. “We have done some very good work, but there has been nothing like this,” said the foundation's president, Jordi Mercader.at the press conference in which an exhibition was presented presenting, in addition to this symbolic painting, the results of extensive research on the process of its creation in the Galatea Tower.

Another transcendental work by Dalí has ​​also been transferred there, and in an unmistakable Eucharistic sense (usually in another space of the Theater Museum), bread basket (1945): “For Christ of St. John of the Cross I used the same technique and the same artistic texture as for the Bread Basket, which, even in its time, represented for me the Eucharist more or less unconsciously.” Dali.

See in a dream

Christ portligat Also called de Sant Joan de la Creu because of the position the crucifix is ​​in, it is inspired by a 16th century Spanish religious painting. “The first time I saw the drawing, I was so moved that, later, in California, I saw Christ in a dream in the same pose but in the view of Portligat, and I heard voices telling me: ‘Dalí, you have to paint this Christ’.” In a writing about this image published in 1952, A Scottish Art ReviewThe artist continued to detail its origin: “I began to paint it the next day. At the moment I began composing it, I intended to include all the attributes of the crucifixion—the nails, the crown of thorns, and so on—and to transform the blood into red carnations nailed to the hands and feet, blossoming from Three jasmine flowers. A side cut. These flowers could have been executed in Zurbaran's austere style. But before the painting was finished, another dream changed all that. (…) I saw my painting again without the narrative features: nothing but beauty The Metaphysics of Christ God.

At that press conference to present the Christ Portligat exhibition, Montse Aguirre, director of the Dali Museums, insisted on this idea expressed by the artist about his work: “Dali talks about religion but mostly about spirituality. He is the beautiful and athletic ChristWith metaphysical and mysterious beauty. As always, Dali’s work breathes mystery and provocation.”

In fact, Dali's published writings Scottish Art Review In its first issue in 1952, specifically devoted to Christ portligat, was a letter from the artist anticipating the purchase of the painting for a fortune of £8,200 by the Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum in Glasgow. Dalí was leaving in the wake of some criticism that the piece painted at Portlegatt received and which the Scottish Museum's then director, Tom Honeyman, had received: “The position of Christ – the angle of view and the tilt of the head – has been changed.” It caused one of the first objections to this painting [apuntava Dalí]. From a religious standpoint, this objection is untenable, since my painting is inspired by a drawing in which Saint John of the Cross himself represents the crucifixion, and in my opinion this drawing – the only drawing ever made by the saint – had to be done as a result. “For ecstasy.”

This controversy occurred (as it did with the Seville Holy Week poster this year) I Christ portligat It remains one of the featured pieces in the Kelvingrove Museum's art collection. The two-metre-high painting had only been seen on two occasions in Spain before now: in 1951 in Madrid and in 1952 in Barcelona, ​​at the first Biennial of Spanish-American Art. Christ Saint John of the Cross It has been exhibited all over the world, in places such as London, Paris, New York or the Dalí Museum in Florida. Since 1965, very few of them have been loaned out and have never returned to Empordà since Dalí painted them in Portligat, more than seventy years ago.

As the directors of the Gala Salvador Dalí Foundation explained, the artist was at that time at “a moment of transformation and also the culmination of his desire to become a classic and a ‘savior’ of modern painting. The incorporation of religious representations and episodes into his artistic repertoire is, along with the recovery of the postulates of quantum mechanics, As a result of the development of his thinking. The messiah It is the painting that connects the two stages, and it serves as a transitional stage and leads us towards the nuclear Sufi period.”

The architect Joan Pasgoda Nonil (1930-2012), an expert on Gaudí's work who was president of the Royal Catalan Academy of Fine Arts in Sant Jordi, studied Dalí's religious painting in depth and wrote, for example, that “that Surrealist revolutionary was (…) Author of great precious paintings of the religious type, treated with wonderful delicacy, and appearing, for example, in representations of Christ, where the face of the Lord cannot be seen, as from Christ Saint John of the Cross s Christ portligat (1951), where the nails and other symbols of the crucifixion are also not visible, and the figure remains slightly detached from the cross, above a landscape of Portligat rocks and a completely black sky background. In the same year, 1951, he commented on the truth in his book Sufi statementIt explains that although Jesus Christ had a human form, because he was indestructible, he could not be depicted as if he were a tortured human being.”

Pasgoda Nonnell also wrote about Dali's other paintings relating to the Passion of the Christ, and came to equally surprising conclusions: “In case… Hypercubic body (1954) The Eucharistic Cross consists of eight cubes in a three-dimensional arrangement in which the figure of Christ represents the head foreshortened, preventing the face from being seen, while the body remains without ever resting on the cross. Weightlessness in space. It is a fascinating exercise in perspective according to the exact procedures described by Filippo Brunelleschi, Luca Pacioli, Piero D'Elia Francesca, Paolo Uccello, or Andrea del Castagno. The cross was no longer a hideous instrument of torture, but a geometric expression of a philosophical kindWith a great depth of symbolism and transcendence.”

In the same context, he points out that “another combination of geometry and religious painting can be seen in… Holy Supper (1955), in which Christ and the Apostles are included in the dodecahedron pentahedron, a regular polyhedron that represents, according to Plato's disciples, the fifth essence, because within this polyhedron it is possible to write the other regular polyhedra, the cube, the tetrahedron, the octahedron and the icosahedron, represented The four elements of the universe: earth, fire, water and air.

According to Basiguda Nonil, “These geometric representations show not only the artistic knowledge of the master, but also scientific knowledgeBecause Dali studied theses on nuclear energy and psychoanalysis by Freud and especially the theories of occult geometry by Juan de Herrera through… Treaty of the cubic body according to the principles of the art of Raimundo Lollio“Where the mystical ideas of the Middle Ages combine with the geometric concepts of the Renaissance.”