Eternal inspirations: revisiting Dali's universe

We decided to go back in time and pay a visit to this personality from the art world; at Lafloïd, the great characters that belong to the past and have contributed so much to history, remain a source of inspiration in our everyday work. This does not mean that we distance ourselves from the present, today´s happenings are our most relevant source of inspiration when creating our masterpieces. However, yesterday is still an open encyclopedia in which we like to immerse ourselves from time to time, remembering our origins and bringing those ideas to the present. Salvador Dalí, in particular, is an interesting figure for us, because he belongs to our narrative: the first encounters that gave rise to Lafloïd took place in this incredibly creative time period, specifically in his universe, giving us an aesthetic sense and a way of seeing the world that we happily embrace.

Salvador Dalí is one of the maximum representatives of the surrealist movement, belonging to an even larger category that is generally known as the modernist movement, which emerged after the First World War in Europe. The continent was devastated, and its members saw their reality through a different lens, and were eager to find new ways to express the shifting mentality of its people. The Surrealists focused on exploring the internal world of each person, "the psyche", and the unconscious, which had been abandoned until this moment. They saw dreams as a territory where individuals could move without the restrictions imposed by society and themselves, and access repressed areas both personally and collectively.

Dalí's art production requires imagination to understand it, since it is absolutely irrational, without an obvious logic or explanation for everyone to understand. However, they are very powerful masterpieces, that make you feel, encourage thought,  and have the capability of transporting you to unknown territories. The postwar period is a magical time at an artistic level since it was a kind of Cultural Revolution, countless movements such as the Dadaism, Cubism, Expressionism and Futurism — all the “isms” — which constituted modern art, had their respective participants, artists, poets and philosophers. , who relied on their respective manifests to carry out their movements. All the characters that made up the movements lived in the same cities, Paris being the epicenter, and they met in cafes and other locations to discuss their way of seeing the world.

Somehow, all of these artists were linked, knew each other, and shared much more than an isolated historical period, making this artistic period a little more exciting. For example, magical characters such as Gala, muse of various artists, such as Max Ernst, and wife of two of them: Paul Éluard and Dalí himself. Or Luis Buñuel, with whom Dalí made the film Un chien andalou, or René Magritte, a mutual friend of all. By pulling out one of these characters, you are involved in the lives of many more, which gives you a sense of the community they had built at the time.

Although brief, I hope that this short visit to the modernist world has served as a motivation to further explore Dali´s, or any of his contemporaries, artistic and literary productions, and get better acquainted with their cultural movement. Only in Madrid, there are permanent exhibitions in museums such as the Thyssen-Bornemisza, the Prado, or the Reina Sofia, where you can see the paintings first hand. At Lafloïd, we enjoy these escapes very often, and recommend them to anyone with an interest in fashion and art.