Dali

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About the artwork

In the sculpture “Profile of Time”, the watch undergoes a figurative transformation and shows the artist’s self-portrait. By melting on the olive tree, the clock shows the spectator its double image. Looking at it, bending the head left, a second hidden image appears; the face of the watch turns into the artist’s profile: an eye, a pointed nose and the 9, alluding to Dalí’s moustache. This sculpture also illustrates Salvador Dalí’s obsession for food and cannibalism. "All my experiences are visceral,” said Dalí "everything begins in the mouth and then goes elsewhere in the body, with the nerves. Man’s first philosophical instrument par excellence is his awareness of the real by his jaws”. The bronze “Profile of Time” also shows the observer another hidden image, that of a cheese that would have completely lost its shape if it had not been held up by the branches of the olive tree. The Catalan genius illustrated time as a Camembert cheese melting and represented his deep concern for the concept of time. The idea of the soft watch arose in a period when Dalí recognised Gala as the “Angel of Equilibrium”, the fundamental figure for constructing his new identity. Salvador Dalí declared: “She was the Angel of Equilibrium, the precursor of my classicism. Far from becoming depersonalized, I got rid of the cumbersome, sterile and dusty tyranny of symptoms and of tics,tics,tics. […] Instead of hardening me, as life had planned, Gala, with the petrifying saliva of her fanatical devotion, succeeded in building for me a shell to protect the tender nakedness of the Bernard the Hermit that I was, so that while in relation to the outside world I assumed more and more the appearance of a fortress, within myself I could continue to grow old in the soft, and in the supersoft. And the day I decided to paint watches, I painted them soft”. In this regard, the sculpture “Profile of Time” is an elegy to Gala and, we can certainly state that this sculpture would not exist, as we can admire it today, if Dalí had not met Gala, and if he had not been born in his beloved Catalonia. In this bronze work, the soft clock also takes on the shape of a tongue, not lacking a visible amount of saliva. Salvador Dalí declared his desire to want to consume “theoretical meal […] with the headier and deliquescent imponderable of Camembert” and, in creating the sculpture “Profile of Time”, the artist decided to serve a theoretical and irrational meal on the branches of an olive tree. The visible amount of saliva that runs down the chin of the Dalí-soft watch profile is a dalinian symbol connected to the pleasure drawn from painting and sleeping, that of drooling and salivating. Dalí asserted: “Sleeping and painting make me slaver with pleasure. Of course, with a rapid or lazy movement of the back of my hand, I could wipe my face during one of my paradisiacal awakenings or one of the no less paradisiacal pauses during my work, but I am so completely addicted to my vital and intellectual ecstasies that I do not do so!”.

About the artist