The Endless Enigma

What you are looking at

The photograph shows the interior of a vast industrial hall, its iron columns and roof trusses lit in deep blue and purple. Every wall and much of the floor is covered in moving projections of Salvador Dalí's imagery: spindly-legged elephants carrying obelisks, a leaping tiger, a pomegranate, floating spheres, a flat Surrealist plain stretching to a low horizon. Visitors stand or sit among the images, dwarfed by them, and a glowing red pattern spreads across the floor.

This is Dalí, l'énigme sans fin, an immersive exhibition at the Atelier des Lumières in Paris. It opened on 19 May 2021, after delays caused by the Covid-19 pandemic, and closed on 2 January 2022.

The exhibition

The Atelier des Lumières occupies a former nineteenth-century iron foundry in the 11th arrondissement and is run by Culturespaces as a venue for digital art shows. Its programs take the work of a famous painter and turn it into a continuous projected sequence, set to music, across some 3,300 square meters of walls and floor. The Dalí program traced his career over about sixty years, from early landscapes of Catalonia through Surrealism to his later religious and scientific imagery. It was set to music by Pink Floyd.

The fragments in the photograph come from several paintings, among them Dream Caused by the Flight of a Bee around a Pomegranate a Second Before Awakening (1944), the source of the tiger and pomegranate, and The Temptation of Saint Anthony (1946), the source of the elephants on stilts.

The painting behind the title

The exhibition took its name from The Endless Enigma, an oil painting of 1938 now in the Museo Reina Sofía, Madrid. It is one of Dalí's most elaborate "double images": a beach scene at Cap de Creus that can also be read, depending on how you look, as a reclining figure, a mandolin and fruit bowl, a philosopher, a greyhound and a monster. Dalí called this the paranoiac-critical method, a way of seeing several realities in one set of forms. An endless enigma, in other words, was what he wanted every image to be.

What to make of it

Immersive shows divide opinion. Supporters say they bring art to audiences who rarely visit museums; critics argue that projected, animated details lose the scale, texture and precision that make Dalí's small, meticulous canvases remarkable. The truth is probably that they are a different experience, closer to theater than to looking at a painting. Dalí's dream imagery itself has deep roots in nineteenth-century Symbolism, and his best-known canvases rank among the most famous paintings of the twentieth century.

Where to see Dalí

The exhibition has closed. Dalí's paintings can be seen at the Dalí Theatre-Museum in Figueres, the Reina Sofía in Madrid and the Salvador Dalí Museum in St. Petersburg, Florida. See also the Salvador Dalí page.