The Ascension of Christ
Salvador Dalí
SALVADOR DALÍ, 1958. OIL ON CANVAS.
In the 1950s, still reeling from the psychological shock of the atomic bomb and frustrated with the growing ‘I, Me, Mine’ mindset of post war individualism, Salvador Dalí found his faith. Integrating a fascination with atomic physics with Spanish mysticism, Dalí began to see the two schools of thought as one and the same. The atom took on a metaphysical form, representing the unity of the universe, Christ himself. We see this clearly in this most strange of religious painting, as a foreshortened Christ, seen as if from a human perspective as he rises above and away from us on the ground. His body forms a triangle representing the holy trinity and he moves towards a glowing, yellow circle, the nucleus of an enlarged atom. Dalí plays with perspective, each element of the painting seemingly seen from a different viewpoint and as Christ ascends, he does so not into some distant nothingness or faraway heaven but towards a nearby sun, into the atom that binds all of us together as one.