Salvador Dalì
Giraffa Infuocata

It's wonderful that paintings can be reviewed...

I chose a work by Salvador Dalí. He was an artist who embraced Surrealism and even invented his own particular technique of automatism, which he himself called the "paranoiac-critical method". Dalí defines paranoia as "a chronic mental illness, whose symptomatology consists of systematic delusions. The delusions can take the form of persecution mania or of grandeur or ambition".

Dalí rationalizes his delirium: paranoia emerges from his murky unconscious and takes shape in his works.

In Dalí's paintings, different themes are frequent, and in particular, the one I will analyze is the theme of the human body with drawers.

In "The Burning Giraffe", the psychoanalytic symbolism is evident. Dalí, following Freud's studies, states that the human body is full of secret drawers, often full of our paranoias and our taboos. The artist, like a thief, has the task of opening them and discovering what they contain in search of the true essence of man.

The painting represents a female figure in the foreground; instead of a head, she has an amorphous mass, perhaps a skull or a clump of blood; skeletal hands also bloodied. The body appears supported by crutches, and the drawers open along the woman's left leg and under her breast. To the right is another female figure, also propped up by crutches that support her, and from her head sprouts a shrub... And there in the distance, the burning giraffe, contrasting with the background, appears as an allegory of violence and death. The image of the burning giraffe likely recalls the period of the Spanish Civil War, as the canvas was painted a few months before the Anschluss; it is therefore a symbol of a dark omen and anguish.

Dalí's art, while maintaining recognizable forms, distorts them. His works, featuring dreamlike elements, sexual taboos, and desires for power emerging from consciousness... Materialize on the canvas, generating ambiguous, gruesome, unsettling forms... Perhaps because it is the very representation of our unconscious in front of our incredulous eyes.