During the 1930s, Dalí filled entire sketchbooks with various proposals for furniture that he would have liked to see in the cinema, use as advertising media or have in his home. These were objects with a high symbolic content and refined formal value.
During Salvador's lifetime, Robert Descharnes and I had discussed the possibility of producing some of these Dalinian designs, which, for various reasons, Salvador had not been able to make at the time. Years later, from among hundreds of Dalinian sketches of designs to be executed with Jean Michel Frank, Robert and I chose those that were most viable to reproduce.
The precedent for these objects was the Dalilips sofa that I made with Dalí for the Mae West Room at the Figueres Museum. During this collaboration I realised that Dalí was a great thinker, almost a conceptual artist. He did not like to intervene in the details that he normally left to me. After the Dalilips, the door was open to future collaborations, including this collection made twenty years later.
In the case of the Leda armchair and table, the scope for interpretation was much more limited, since we were not starting from a sketch, but from an ultra-realistic painting by the Master, which provided extremely detailed information.
I think that, with the completion of this project, Robert, I and the sculptor Joaquim Camps came very close to what Dalí would have done if he could have controlled these designs. Dalí said that the best thing about his work was the ideas and the worst thing was the execution. He even had the idea of selling ideas at very high prices in little envelopes, as if it were a raffle. We inherited one of these little envelopes and made it a reality.
All these designs have the approval of the Gala Salvador Dalí Foundation.