Who do you think of first when you hear: “artistic use of optical illusions”? For me the first name that comes to mind is Salvador Dali. And it goes beyond simply that his paintings were trippy or cool, because in order for Dali to achieve that “trippy” or “cool” optical illusion there needs to be a deep understanding of space, perspective, color and much more. In other words, talent needs to back it!
Dali in fact did have many years of education and skill in various mediums, including photography, sculpture and obviously painting.
Dali work falls into the category of surrealist art, a form of art that originated in the late 1910s and early ’20s. The surrealist movement experimented with a new mode of expression called automatism, which was intended to release the unchecked imagination of the subconscious.
Dali took this theory to the next level by creating a technique that he called “The paranoiac-critical method”. A large inspiration of Dali’s method was paranoia and the brains ability to perceive links between things that are not logically linked to each other. His work often incorporated double or multiple images which created two or more images within one image.
André Breton was enthusiastic about Dali’s method saying that it was an “instrument of primary importance“. He went on to say that it “has immediately shown itself capable of being applied equally to painting, poetry, the cinema, the construction of typical Surrealist objects, fashion, sculpture, the history of art, and even, if necessary, all manner of exegesis.”
Dalí described the paranoiac-critical method as a “spontaneous method of irrational knowledge based on the critical and systematic objectivity of the associations and interpretations of delirious phenomena.”
Personally what I find the most fascinating about his work is how in tuned he must have been to creating it. While we view it and find the images in a way that requires de-activating the rational mind, while in order to succeed in this method I’d think that it requires an active process of visualizing multiple layers of objects and images that could be interpreted in a variety of ways.
The irony of how I see the his method and how he describes it is that while I imagine the method needing to be premeditated and well thought out he describes it as “spontaneous”… I guess that’s what makes him Dali!