Salvador Dalí

SALVADOR DALÍ I DOMÉNECH (Figueras, Girona, 1904 - 1989).
"Soft clock". 1975 (cast in 2004).
Bronze sculpture, lost wax, patinated in dark green.
Exemplary 2/6.
Numbered, signed by the artist, with signature of the Arte6 Foundry and Diejasa Edition.
Certified by Robert Descharnes (2004) and Nicolas Descharnes (2014).
This is a limited reedition of 6 pieces from the Clot Collection.
Measurements: 235 x 98 x 59 cm.

The melted clock motif has probably been the most praised of Dalí's host of surrealist objects. In the painting "The Persistence of Memory" (1931), the soft clocks slipped from their supports and slid through an arid terrain of metaphysical cadences. The sculptural clock shown here was conceived by Dalí some forty years later. The green patinated bronze seems to melt like a liquid gem, suggesting to us that linear and objective time does not exist, but that it is malleable and subjective, playful and elastic like this clock whose dial and Arabic numerals are elongated and distorted by the effect of gravity. Dalí, a great reader of Freud, supported the Freudian concept of the "elasticity of psychic time" (that of memory and dreams) and managed to give it a unique visual form. It should also be noted that Dalí's works with melted clocks contain an underlying critique of the rigidity of time in modern society, where people are often dominated by the clock and the concept of linear time.

This monumental sculpture of a soft clock (a genuine Dalí motif par excellence) comes from Isidro Clot's sculpture collection. The collection was initially conceived in the summer of 1971 in Port Lligat, where an elderly Dalí, but still with plenty of creative enthusiasm, began to sculpt a series of wax sculptures. The figures were modeled under the hot Mediterranean sun, which made the wax soft and malleable, leaving the delicate fingers of the master from Figueras marked on the surface. In his book "Dalí: The Hard and the Soft Spells for the Magic of Form: Sculptures and Objects", Robert Descharnes, a friend and renowned Dalí expert, describes the process of creating the sculptures. In 1973, 44 sculptures made so far were cast in bronze by his friend Isidro Clot, who ran the Diejasa foundry together with his son-in-law Adrián Campos. The casting process was closely followed by Dalí, a very important aspect that makes the piece in bidding an original of the genius of Port Lligat.

The work we present here is part of a limited reedition of six pieces from the Clot Collection, cast by Diejasa. To the same series belong: "Venus of the tires", "Geminis", "Victory of Samothrace" and "Elephant-swan".

The sculptures that make up the Clot Collection reflect Dalí's maturity and distorted classicism, in such a way that they define the themes that disturbed and aroused the curiosity of the surrealist master throughout his life: Ancient Greece, eroticism, psychism, his relationship with Gala, playfulness, Christian iconography... and the paranoiac-critical transfiguration of all these references.