This fountain is not a work by Salvador Dalí, it is a monument to his person. Therefore, it aims to allude to his work.

Translating a painting by Dalí into a three-dimensional and monumental scale is no easy task, and it has often ended up bordering on kitsch.

In this work, I did not aim for a directly mimetic reproduction of a specific painting, but rather a creative interpretation of one of the obsessions in Dalí's work: his obsession with cypress trees, with impossible cypress trees. An obsession that has given rise to numerous paintings by the Master, and to a corporeal work: the cypress that emerges from a boat, near the entrance of his house in Port Lligat. An impossible cypress, truly surreal, like the one from which a white horse appears, or a strange trumpet, or one that emerges from a grand piano, or another from which a fountain springs… all imagined and painted by Salvador.

A cypress from which water would flow, water that would spill over a slate pond in Cadaqués that surrounded it.

A cypress realistic enough that, from a distance, it would confuse us with its scale—was it a real cypress?

At first, I thought of erecting the tallest cypress in the world (which would have delighted the Master) by stacking four floors of real cypress trees. I loved the idea, and having seen plantations—in the same Empordà—where the cypress trees touched one another, it seemed feasible. However, the Gala Dalí Foundation, the promoter of the project, objected that the maintenance of this vegetal tower would be prohibitively expensive and that we couldn’t rely on the City Hall to take it on. I was forced to look for an alternative, and the best I found was to create a sculpture using stainless steel slats in a green color, whose maintenance seemed guaranteed.