Dali at the MoMA

Weird hallucinations and wacky dreams were my impressions of his work before I came to this exhibition. I never was a big Dali fan but in the hour and a half that I spent at the MoMA, his paintings and film work grew on me.

At the entrance, one is greeted by a photograph of this Catalonian, one eye looking through a metal piece which appears to have given him five other eyeballs. Bordering on the distasteful and disturbing, that's how I would best describe his style. Distorted images and his fascination for hands, swarming ants, eyeballs, melting watches, telephones are only a few of his subjects. I saw the provocative and the controversial in his work but at the same time I learned of the messages they convey.

A bit disappointed at the small size of his famous piece The Persistence of Memory (Photo credit: MoMA.org), I envisioned it would occupy a huge space on the wall. His visual work on the dream sequence from Hitchcock's Spellbound was cleverly presented with the movie clips as the backdrop. Metamorphosis is the Dali theme written all over this exhibition. The transformation of the giant swarming ants into cyclists in the short film Destino was impressive.

I must confess I didn't really know Dali's work until now. His passion for the cinema is something new to me. "The best cinema," he claimed, "is the kind that can be perceived with your eyes closed." There's a lot about his work I'll never understand, only now I have greater appreciation for them. Too bad picture taking is not allowed. I'd like to see this again.

The MoMA was packed on this Friday free night admission with tourists from all over the world, many of them Spaniards of course, students off from school and locals like me needing a mini-vacation. It was worth the trip to the city even with the hot air jetting out from underground in the subways.

The architecture of the renovated MoMA is an artwork in itself.
Highly recommended.

It's surreal.