«Dali. Revolution and Tradition”, curated by Carme Ruiz González and Lucia Moni, running in Rome until February 1st at Palazzo Cipolla, home of the Museo del Corso – Museum Complex, retraces the entire creative parable of the irreverent genius of the twentieth century: from the years of joining the European avant-garde to the personal dialogue with the great masters of art history. With the aim of «deepening the evolution of Salvador Dalí’s work and thought», as declared by Montse Aguer, director of the Dalí Museums. The exhibition project, however, ended up being excessively didactic. The paintings are suffocated by overwhelming explanatory and in-depth apparatus, by documents, audiovisual materials and photographs.
Out of 60 works these materials reign supreme. If it is true that we fall into the opposite error of thinking that a good installation should not need words, but to let things speak, here the measure has been lost. Teaching is one thing, the atmosphere capable of engaging is another. Even the theme on which the scientific project was built – Dalì’s artistic journey between the two poles of revolution and tradition – is in reality not a specific Catalan figure. And the thought can only go to Pablo Picasso himself, who became both a model and an antagonist for him.
He called himself a “cannibal”, with a clear awareness of his own carnal experimentation in continuous search for new forms and new materials. An experimentalism in dialectical tension with tradition. Themes and motifs of art history have been devoured by Picasso’s gesture. An art remade on art. So much so that for both artists the physical law of mass conservation could be applied: “nothing is created, nothing is destroyed, everything is transformed”. The first «revolution» section is dedicated to the comparison with Picasso, with works such as «Table facing the sea. Homage to Erik Satie” or “Figures Lying on the Sand” (both c. 1926). The second focuses on the return to tradition. Works in homage to Velázquez are a copy and a stereoscopic installation of «Las Meninas»; to Vermeer, whose Lacemaker Dalì associates with the rhinoceros horn, a cosmic emblem, with which he also decomposes Raphael’s Saint Cecilia in «The Ascension of Saint Cecilia» (c. 1955) and The Madonna del Belvedere in «Maximum acceleration of Raphael’s Madonna» (1954), making visual deceptions that confuse the observer. Raphael’s «Self-portrait» from the Uffizi (1506) is on display, alongside his «Self-portrait with Raphael’s neck» (1921), and, again, the «School of Athens» and «Fire of the Borgo» become the terrain of still stereoscopic experimentalism in another work on display (1979).
These are the three masters who have become a pillar of the theoretical reflection of the Catalan master, which culminates in the treatise «50 magical secrets for painting» (1948), whose illustrations are exhibited for the first time in Italy. But Surrealism? Where are those “hand-painted photographs of dreams”, as the Catalan visionary defined his paintings? Apart from a few works already mentioned, «Enigmatic elements in a landscape» (1934) and little else, it is only in the last room that the works (finally) speak without too much interference: in «In Search of the Fourth Dimension» (1979), with its ancestral and disturbing landscape dominated by a gigantic “soft” clock, we find that iconic repertoire that makes the visionary painter immediately recognizable even to a profane eye. In short, there is too little Dalì at the Dalì exhibition.