by English C1 students school year 2022/23

“La persistència de la memòria” by Salvador Dalí

This masterpiece has always caught my eye, mainly because of the clocks, giving me the understanding that time passes very quickly. Time is not static and this is why clocks melt with the passage of years; it grows old just like us. There´s something that terrifies me. Not only that time passes so fast to me but also that over the years our minds deteriorate, reaching a point where I´m aware that I have begin to forget things that I used to remember well.

I associate the passage of time with the elderly, and therefore with the atrophy of our body and mind, and it scares me to death that this last one will atrophy so bad that you can even forget your own name. That´s awful. For me, losing your memory, your mind, is like losing yourself, without even knowing who you are, like being brain dead.

The style used in this painting is surrealism and its technique is oil on canvas. This is a quite complex and stunning piece of art. Several symbols are represented, for instance, we can observe three clocks symbolizing non-linear time where the past, present and future exist simultaneously, just like in dreams. The fourth clock is solid and represents the present time, a linear one. This one is full of ants and the author associates them with rottenness and death. One can also highlight a huge sea that symbolizes eternity and immortality, and a large deserted beach where the author portrays himself in a very peculiar way.

This striking artwork portrays an extravagant landscape through Dalí´s vision and it evokes a certain kind of madness in me, which reminds me that I can´t control time; time controls me.

Andrea Planas