'Dalí's Hand Drawing Back the Golden Fleece
in the Form of a Cloud to Show Gala the Dawn,
Completely Nude, Very, Very Far Away Behind the Sun'

(stereoscopic work, left and right component), 1977

-oil on canvas, stereoscopic painting with two components

60 x 60 cm

Fundación Gala-Salvador Dalí, Figueras

 

Symbolic as it is these paintings stress several issues of the subject of time. First there is the stereoscopic view, rarely practiced in the arts. It is not just depth that is suggested. The specialization of the human brain in two halves is all about the alignment of time to the place (linear left field, serial right field). Seeing spacetime one orients to space and time. The two cannot be separated. More than that Dali places his wife behind the sun suggesting that mother earth, that goddess, is subservient to father time as we respect by the sun. Next the theme is not the vision of the modern but the nostalgia for the old and its natural sense of cyclic time. Ships with sails and classical pillars. The 'golden fleece' covering the head of the woman suggests that our ignorance of the earthbound is to be shown by the creator, in this case Dali himself. These paintings contain a lecture on modern time its symmetry, its ignorance and its priority.