A virgin, and with a mass of confusions and successes, at the age of 25, Dalí exhibits one of the most representative works of Surrealism and of himself. In it manages to express one of his most anchored obsessions until then, sex and complacency.

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Dalí represents himself in several ways in the center as a being who dreams, who longs for the purest as something tangible, and at the same he doesn’t, for being a dream or a representation; the pearls, the cove and the woman.

But also those closed eyes can be picturing something, trying to consummate his fantasies conceived throughout those years unable to touch someone, be it man or woman, due (it is intuited) to the phobia that his uncle generated when he left him some medical books about syphilis. This fact could have led the painter to experience homoeroticism, masturbation, or both, because it is not until recently that sexually transmitted infections changed their name, since before they were called venereal, from Venus, associated more than anything to women, who if they did not transmit them, generated them.

Lust can be seen best represented in the two figures at the foot of the painting, where the man as an articulated figurine (Dalí) embraces a sketch of a woman emerging from a stone. The imager knows that in his fantasy he is still unreal, faceless, without identity, as unreal as the desired object is, ready to be molded and manipulated in the image and likeness of his desires. Others interpret the mane lion as Medusa and the phallic tongue as sexual desire, the king of this forest called body, ready to petrify anyone who dares to face her, to look her in the eyes and masturbate.

At the same time, another message coexists, where what is admired must be corrupted, transformed, or why not, humiliated; we can tell by the image of the author, he wears a tight-fitting pair of pants as if packed in vacuum, insinuating the member and offering it to the object-desire at the height of her face so that she can practice oral sex.

Another painting in which the act of masturbation is highlighted is in “The Lugubrious Game”. In this work a statue stands out because of the large size of its hand, and the shame it feels to do so, probably because of the moral and religious implications that every sexual act has had in front of the Church, filling the author with guilt, combined, as i said before, with the fear of contracting some sexually transmitted disease, which the grasshopper helps to represent.

It is said that Gala helped him to dissipate those phobias, revealing to him that other forms of sexual expression existed, and that not only the act of penetrating was the appropriate nor the purest, but masturbation also was; He preferred to touch someone else's body while masturbating, or watch them get filthy, and remain impeccable.

Ysaías Núñez