An anti-conformist movement, surrealism plays with taboos. It is therefore without complex that he frees himself from academic modesty in his artistic representations of the female body. Object of desire, the eroticized woman reveals herself naked under the lens of Man Ray or as models at de Chirico and Dali, in a subversive sensuality. This idealization of the body, however, locks the woman into the role of a silent muse. She is the embodiment of mythical worship, the docile inspirer of macho stereotypes. Sade, rediscovered with enthusiasm by Man Ray, Max Ernst, Bellmer or Dali, illustrates well the contradiction of the surrealists between the romantic exaltation of the Woman-muse - beautiful, young, innocent and seductive - but also knowing how to nourish desire and creativity , often perverse of the artist. In short, the surrealist movement (which at its creation had no woman within it) reconciles love and eroticism, but proclaims the freedom of women exclusively through the desire of men. When he met Gala in 1929, Salvador Dali had only an abstract and infantile idea of women. He presented himself to her covered with goat excrement and scarified armpits. A free, brilliant woman, close to Brassaï, Char or Crevel, Gala will have a fundamental impact on Dali's psychological evolution, and also on his thought and his work. Unique model of the painter, often described as authoritarian, iconoclastic and avant-garde, Gala literally shaped Dali's talent and freed him from an exclusively macho vision of women. A great reader of Freud, Dali nicknamed her Gradiva, allegory of the saving woman. Gala is the one who appears to "break down the barriers of my childish fantasies [...] by exposing herself in front of me with her own obsessions". From then on, Dali transcends his anguish of death, channels his madness into "paranoia-criticism" whose associations and delirious interpretations provide material for a work of incomparable inventiveness. She is the Visible Woman, he the Invisible Man who only exists through her presence. He will sign with their two mixed names “Dali-Gala” Injustice impossible only one being is in the world Love chooses love without changing its face These lines from Eluard describe this fusional love, which deprives him of his wife Gala. At the origin of the desire of the other is the idea of seeing in the Other an image of oneself. This visible woman becomes omnipresent even hypertrophic in Pat Andrea, who accepted the invitation of Dali Paris. This flag bearer of the New Subjectivity offers a disturbing and interrogative figurative painting. It is through two canvases, and above all a series of original engravings on images by Max Klinger, that the Dutch artist based in Paris will dialogue with the chained bodies of the series by Casanova and the Marquis de Sade. Max Klinger whose engravings influenced, among others, Max Ernst, who was Gala's lover, after Eluard and before Dali… The circle has come full circle. I propose a table, after which it is you who interpret it. Pat Andrea and Dali present many points of convergence: their works take their strength in the mastery of the classic codes of the Renaissance and place the viewer as a voyeur.
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