BY MIGUEL ENRÍQUEZ
Surrealism expressed utopia, paradox and mystery. In soccer, there is no character that is better understood with these characteristics than a goalkeeper, that person who is dedicated to contradict the essence of nature on the field, the man or woman capable of ending the sighs and drowning throats in the stadiums, the hero and the villain, the idol or mockery. The position, curiously, also artistic.
For Salvador Dalí, life and art were one and the same. The mystery of the works of born in Figueras, Spainrepresented, according to him, a unique attraction for society, because it was a reflection of life itself. As a reflection of society is the sport, to which the painter did not run away, but approached it.
Like hundreds of artists, the May 11, 1904 He confronted the criticism of the ball and its protagonists with works that reflected his thoughts on soccer, particularly and peculiarly with the solitary man on the firing squad: the goalkeeper.
From an early age and accompanied in childhood by two future stars of F.C. Barcelona, as were his friends Emilio Sagi and Josep Samitier.In the life of Dalí, who, contrary to the spotlight of his colleagues, decided to go to the goal as a soccer player, but as an artist.
For 1968, as a commission from the Spanish Delegation that traveled to Mexico to compete in the Olympic Games of that year, the greatest exponent of Surrealism focuses his strokes on sports and develops his painting The cosmic athleteThe same that represented the origin of the greatest sporting event in the history of mankind and is characterized by factors such as a monumental being.
In this work Discóbolo de Mirón is depicted.The artist, an expert in representing athletes, but this time with the ability to hold the sun in one hand. Although it seems that in the artistic dyes sport has no place, the high temperatures registered in the social thermometer find their conception in the most banal levels of the human being, where passions overflow, languages are known and values are put into play.
For Surrealism it was no different, Salvador Dalí reminded the world of the cosmovisions hidden by the commonly spherical protagonists of the sports globe.
