RP342 A Method in the Madness

 RP342 A Method in the Madness

Clocks melt like cheese on a hot summer's day, elephants with matchstick-thin legs carry pyramid-shaped monuments on their backs, floating rhinoceros horns form a figure staring out to sea—images like these, pulled from the irrational corners of the mind, were the mysterious subjects of Salvador Dalí.
With his unique dress sense, curled mustache, and eyes wide open as if constantly startled, Salvador Dalí lived his artistic ideas as well as painted them. He presented a lecture while wearing a deep-sea diving suit (including the helmet), resulting in his audience hearing only muffled sounds from within. He invited an art critic to pose while he himself took photos. The camera, however, had no film inside. He designed bizarre art objects like the famous Lobster Telephone. Why, he questioned, was he never given a boiled telephone when he asked for a lobster in a restaurant?
The reason behind Dalí's strange behavior was that he considered himself the physical representation of the surrealist movement. “I myself am surrealism,” he declared as he was being expelled from the surrealist group.
Dalí's version of surrealism involved finding links between things which the rational mind usually would not connect. To do this he used a technique he called the paranoiac-critical method. By inducing a state of extreme distrust and fear of the world around him, objects would take on new forms and become unstuck from their place in the rational world. The method can be compared to how to see different shapes in clouds, or faces in rocks, and allowed Dalí to create what he referred to as “hand-painted dream photographs,” a reflection of his inner mind.
Born in 1904 in northeastern Spain, Dalí's artistic talents were encouraged by his mother, and he studied art in Madrid. He was an extremely talented technical drawer, a skill that would be used to great effect in his paintings, which often used complex geometry and visual illusions.
Dalí's works explore both the ridiculous and terrifying aspects of the illogical. Some people called him insane, but Dalí simply replied, “There is only one difference between a madman and me. The madman thinks he is insane. I know I am mad.”