“My metamorphosis is tradition,
for tradition is precisely change and reinvention of another skin.”
Salvador Dali
If metamorphosis is the art of freeing oneself from time, context and rational thought, Salvador Dalí made it a key element of his creative process: variations, transformations, anamorphoses, disguises, the assimilation of every new invention, and creative bulimia accompanied his quest for the living painting, an expression of a fictional reality, an augmented reality that he wanted to achieve. The images he transforms into sculptures, jewellery and holograms, the three-dimensional projection of his pictorial work, invent a way of visualising fantasy, touching meaning and achieving ‘concrete irrationality’.
By inviting Léo Caillard, whose work originally attracted attention by transforming ancient statues into veritable preppies, Dali Paris wishes to initiate a dialogue on ancient heritage and how it has endured through the centuries, like these Venuses subjected to morphological distortions. The transformation of the divine Heracles into an urban hipster explores the notion of identity, and through this benevolent transgression, the artist ‘exposes the individuals we are today, shaped by social codes and style’. Does this intrusion of modernity into the Platonic ideal of beauty aim, like Dali’s obsession with form, to counteract the natural ravages of time and conquer death by achieving immortality through art?
For Leo Caillard, as for Dali, ‘encountering history’ is ‘a means of understanding time’. But this quest for understanding is much broader for these two artists fascinated by science, Dali with the emergence of the atomic bomb and Léo Caillard with the rise of quantum physics. Although this discipline is only intended for an informed audience, it remains a source of fascination and even fantasy, much like quantum computers, which are capable of executing the most powerful algorithms. Based – in very simplified terms – on the simultaneous existence of bodies in multiple states, it questions the limits of perception. By dressing statues or depicting them as blurred and distorted, was Léo Caillard not seeking to make us reflect on the possible superimposition of incompatible states?
Incompatible, or rather unthinkable, our states of mind during the period that has just passed seem to have been profound. With our horizons constrained and our frames of reference redefined, our perception of things and time has hardened and become fixed.
In an attempt to soften these psychological angles, Dali Paris invites you to witness an intimate dialogue between two artists and appreciate modern and contemporary aesthetics of timeless beauty. This gives rise to reflections on material and intellectual sustainability at a time when instantaneity and transience dominate information, the economy and even human relationships. Are we able to accept the simultaneous existence of several hypotheses without becoming polarised, like Schrödinger’s cat?