Image Essay #4

This piece of artwork is one that is familiar to almost anyone who has any exposure to the artistic world or art history. Created by Salvador Dali (1904-1989), this painting, called The Deterioration of the Persistence of Memory, is an example of the artistic genre of surrealism, thus having an dream-like, unrealistic quality about it.

I selected this piece for discussion because I think it is a wonderful example of tension and illusion of space, two principles we utilized in our “Three Shapes Three Times” project. Tension is created by a balanced relation between strongly opposing elements, which is successfully demonstrated here by the geometric straight-edged bricks placed with loose, curved free-form clocks. Illusion of space is typically created by overlapping and recession of objects into the background. In this painting, the bricks recede back into space toward a common vanishing point, and are overlapped by the melting clocks, thus establishing a sense of depth.

This particular painting also exemplifies pure forms, representational shape, and abstract shapes, as discussed in class and utilized in the “Three Shapes Three Times” project. Pure forms are simple geometric shapes, such as the bricks seen here. A representational shape is an object or image that is portrayed as one would actual see it, such as the realistic-looking mountain/cliff in the background. Abstract shapes are shapes or objects that are distorted or unrealistically rendered, such as the curvy, melting clocks in Dali’s work.