Evolution of Dance Ii, Painting by Carlos Gamez De Francisco

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This painting emerges from a deeply personal reflection on memory and the shifting nature of reality. The first time I … Read more This painting emerges from a deeply personal reflection on memory and the shifting nature of reality. The first time I encountered Salvador Dalí’s The Persistence of Memory, I was captivated by the strange materiality of the melting clocks—objects that felt both familiar and impossibly unreal. That experience stayed with me for years.

My connection to Catalonia added another layer to this fascination. My great-great-grandparents lived in Barcelona before leaving for Cuba, and when I finally traveled to Catalonia to reconnect with my roots, I had the opportunity to see Dalí’s work in person. Experiencing his world firsthand—his ability to reshape reality, bend logic, and play with perception—profoundly shifted how I think about composition and narrative in painting.

From that moment, I began to question the traditional hierarchy of imagery, where the human figure is always the central subject and objects remain secondary. In this work, I invert that relationship. A couch and a chair become the protagonists—animated, expressive, and caught in a moment of dance, as if escaping reality itself. They no longer function as furniture, but as living forms with emotion, rhythm, and presence.

Their gesture becomes a language of liberation and transformation, suggesting that even the most ordinary objects can carry an inner life when freed from expectation. Around them, an elaborate background unfolds with the same intensity and level of detail. Nothing is secondary; every element participates in the narrative, reinforcing the idea that every part of a story holds meaning.

Together, the scene becomes a surreal choreography between object and environment—an homage to Dalí’s dreamlike universe, while also becoming my own reflection on memory, ancestry, and the fluid boundaries between the real and the imagined. See less