04 Aug 2008

Salvador DaliX by Kristofer Paetau at Kressling Gallery

Kristofer Paetau

About the Salvador DaliX paintings:

I was always more interested in - and fascinated by - the person of Salvador Dali than his paintings. As a 'provocateur' and surrealist per excellence he made several legendary interventions and performances which rarely were documented by fotos or film. They mainly exist as stories and legends. Through these stories I discovered many details about the sexual life of Salvador Dali: his initial trauma regarding sex due to his severe father who teached him the dangers of sex when he was only a child, showing him a book with pictures of male genitalia suffering from sexually transmitted diseases. This supposedly lead Dali to become 'The great masturbator' in order to avoid intercourse. Then the trauma with his student friend - the writer Garcia Lorca - who tried to rape him but did not succeed according to Dali. His relatively late discovery of various sexual pleasures with his wife and muse Gala and finally his passion for Amanda Lear, a transvestite and a popstar, with whom he also had a long time relationship and whom he helped financially to make a sex change operation in order to become a 'real' woman. All these stories inspired me to start producing the 'Salvador DaliX' paintings, as an 'hommage' to Dali and as a challenge to myself: trying to make paintings 'à la Dali' that I imagine Dali could have made. Especially the idea of creating 'problematic' paintings interests me. This started with the 'Painting China Now' series that I made together with Ondrej Brody in 2007 and continues with a different purpose in the Salvador DaliX series. The Salvador Dalix paintings are based on pornographic photographs stolen from the internet and manipulated with the computer and then painted by 'my assistants' in China.

My main interests in this series are:

- To create beautiful oil paintings

- To create an ambiguous 'hommage' to Salvador Dali - who is not considered a very serious artist nowdays but who is one of the most popular artists in the world.

- To represent different kinds of sexual preferences (hetero, homo, bi, lesbian, trans) and different kinds of sexual practices: everything from 'normal' sexual practices to bondage, groupsex, sado-masochism, zoophily etc.

- To make a statement about commercial contemporary art today (and painting especially) by using the most efficient tools and production systems that global capitalism provides: stealing porn images from the internet and manipulating them with the computer. Then sending the pictures by e-mail to China where 'my assistants' paint them in 'oil painting factories' according to my specifications and finally showing and (hopefully) selling these paintings in a contemporary art gallery in Europe to open-minded collectors who are able to appreciate their visual sex-appeal and to enjoy the intellectual masturbation that these paintings offer.