L'homme invisible (The Invisible Man)

L'homme invisible (The Invisible Man), started in 1929, is one of the first works Salvador Dalí made in which his paranoiac-critical method materialised via the use of double images. In his article “L'âne pourri” (The Rotten Donkey), published in Le Surréalisme au service de la révolution, the artist described these images as: “The representation of an object which, without the slightest figurative or anatomical modification, is, at the same time, the representation of a completely different object”. A type of image rooted in the teste compostes or composed heads of Giuseppe Arcimboldo and the anthropomorphic landscapes of Joos de Momper, which were popular around 1600.

At first glance, an oneiric landscape with a striking perspective appears populated with fantastical figures and architectures, yet contemplated from the spectator’s viewpoint and as a result of an anamorphic perspective, it reveals the image of a man sat, hands on knees, akin to an Egyptian colossus. In his choice of some of these figures, Dalí draws on images which would run recurrently through his work, for instance the representations of Gradiva and the family of Guillermo Tell. Some of them are, in turn, double images, for example the lying woman-horse that appears in the top-left corner.

The work illustrated an article by Sebastià Gasch in Meridià which featured Carl Einstein’s opinion of the painting of Salvador Dalí, and which, at the height of the Spanish Civil War, criticised his lack of political commitment in his work and his falsely revolutionary aesthetic. 



Raúl Martínez Arranz