The Fundació Gala-Salvador Dalí acquired a surrealist oil-on-wood panel painting entitled Phantom Cart from 1933. It can be seen in the Treasure Room of the Dalí Theatre-Museum in Figueres.
In Phantom Cart, we see, at the centre of a bright arid plain, a two-wheeled wagon heading towards a city. The shape of the cart seems to blend with the city, thus becoming its own destination. The effect is an illusion of perspective in which the painter uses his skill to try to confuse us once again. Where we expect to see the wheels, there are instead two stakes driven into the ground. The characters seen sitting in the wagon are identified with the architecture of the city in the background. In this painting, as in other optical illusions used by the painter, an important role is played by the technique Dalí named the paranoiac-critical method: “spontaneous method of irrational knowledge based on the critical and systematic objectivity of the associations and interpretations of delirious phenomena.” We see a cart and a city or both elements at the same time.
The wagon or cart was a typical means of transport during the painter’s youth. In his autobiography The Secret Life of Salvador Dalí he mentions this in relation to the Pichot family: “I started off in a cart with Mr and Mrs Pichot and Julia, their adopted daughter of sixteen, who had long black hair. Mr Pichot drove the cart himself.” The wagon is also an element present in surrealist iconography and in the films of Luis Buñuel, such as for example Belle de jour. www.salvador-dali.org