There will be more “Reactions” posts, as you might have noticed, because I am co-teaching an adult Sunday school class on the Bible and Art. Each week we are taking on a passage in scripture and looking at a particular work as an interpretation of that scene. Last week we did Salvador Dali’s famous masterpiece, Christ of Saint John of the Cross. What are your thoughts?
Nice picture. Nice idea: showing the heavens as the destination or goal of John, and not the ground. True to John’s transcendentalism.
Key to Salvador Dali’s art is his pursuit of concretization of dreams. This involves a credible breach in the civilizational habit of taking reality as fixed entity. Art such as this has to be hyper real in details. This exactness of minute attributes is fraught with danger as modern art abhors photo-realism and definitely the spatial illusion is a raging anathema in the canon of modern art. This is a testimony to ‘freakish talent’ of Dali that he pulled off the audacious artistic coup of ‘renaissance like modern art’.
http://modernartists.blogspot.com/2012/01/salvador-dali-realism-for-unreal-world.html