Never before has the work of two famous Catalans, the painter Salvador Dali and the architect Antoni Gaudi, appeared before the audience in such a stunning way as it has been presented by the French operator of immersive exhibitions for historical monuments, museums and art centers Culturespaces.
“Dali, the Infinite Enigma” and “Gaudi, Architect of the Imaginary” are two new immersive exhibitions that run from February 2023 to January 2024 in Bordeaux at the unique Pools of Light exhibition space.
The exhibition about Dali presents more than 60 years of work by the epathetic Catalan master, one of the most enigmatic painters in history, graphic artist, sculptor, filmmaker and writer. Developed under the influence of Cubism and Futurism, who became an iconic figure in Surrealism, Dali came to a carefully executed realism on canvas, about which it was said that the real was nevertheless muddled with mysteries of the mind, fantasies and allusions of memories.
While exploring the exhibition, the viewer walks in digital visions as an accomplice among the metaphysical landscapes and images of an artist with an inimitable imagination. Paintings, drawings, photographs, installations, film footage, details of works, coming alive on the walls, reflected in the water of “Pools of Light”, of course, do not solve the mystery, but still bring us closer to the mysteries of the personality of the artist with the original mustache, to his obsession with the strange, and to the passion that his muse and wife, Gala, inspired him.
Everything takes place to the music of the legendary British band Pink Floyd, offering a timeless journey that awakens the subconscious.
One of Dali’s important sources of inspiration was the work of the architect Gaudi, whose early twentieth-century works were considered provocative and often criticized. Dali was a staunch defender of the visionary Gaudí. A second fascinating exhibition at Pools of Light pays tribute to this architectural genius and his famous buildings, which have now been classified as UNESCO World Heritage Sites.
The visitor of the exhibition is immersed in another journey in which it is difficult to distinguish between the imaginary and reality. He walks through Barcelona from Park Güell to the Casa Batlló, entering the Casa Milà and visiting the inimitable wonder of the Sagrada Familia. The faceless construction of the Pools of Light suddenly takes on the outlines of hyperbolic vaults, fanciful columns, wavy facades, covered with ornaments and Gaudi’s invariably pleasing glass and ceramic mosaics.
Culturespaces was created in 1990 by Bruno Monnier. In 2020, Culturespaces opened a “digital art center” in Bordeaux, considered to be the largest in the world. It is housed in the hulks of a former Italian and German submarine base built in 1941-1943 in France occupied during World War II.
It is another story under the slogan “from the atrocities of war to the pinnacles of art.
After the war there was the question of what to do with this gigantic bunker of 600,000 cubic meters of concrete. For decades it stood abandoned. In 1990 a failed attempt was made to convert it into an international museum for pleasure boats, which were placed inside the base. But the public was not interested. And the concrete structures once again fell into oblivion. Until 2020.
Then Culturespaces people showed up at the former military base, and it became known as Pools of Light. The Digital Art Center took over four of the existing eleven pools. Immersive exhibitions are projected on 12,000 square meters of the base. Since the Pools of Light opened, it has already hosted digital exhibitions by artists Gustav Klimt, Claude Monet, Auguste Renoir, and Venetian art, and a number of other exciting educational projects have taken place within the walls built for mass murder techniques.
