Endless Enigma

In 1929, Salvador Dalí joined the Surrealist group of André Breton, who claimed his art was the “most hallucinatory we know of”. Until his definitive expulsion from the group in 1939, he was as illustrious as he was controversial, both as an artist and a theorist. In 1930, Dalí published the text “L'âne pourri” (The Rotten Donkey) in the first issue of Breton’s magazine Le Surrealisme au service de la Révolution, anticipating what would become his paranoiac-critical method, an approach that draws from an active process of the mind through which, from a specific combination of images, another completely different one is perceived. In the late 1930s, the method would be fully realised with Endless Enigma, a work unveiled in the Julien Levy Gallery in New York in 1939. In the catalogue text, in addition to including a diagram of the six different images generated by the painting, Dalí rendered a reflection on his method: “Before the Cubist painting one wonders: What does that represent? In a Surrealist painting one sees what is represented, but asks: What does that mean? Before a “paranoiac painting” one significantly asks: What do I see? What does that represent? What does that mean? Undoubtedly, it means one thing: the end of so-called modern painting based on idleness, simplicity and joyful decorativism”.

Raúl Martínez Arranz