Llegaremos más tarde. Hacia las cinco (We'll Be Arriving Later. About Five O'Clock)

Salvador Dalí painted The Truck (We'll be Arriving Later, About Five O'clock) in 1983, the year a major retrospective exhibition on his work was being put together in Madrid and Barcelona. In the exhibition catalogue 400 Works by Salvador Dalí from 1914 to 1983 (MEAC, 1983), Ignacio Gómez de Liaño recounted, in the text Dalí Seen by Pitxot, Dalí and Antonio Pitxot’s conversations about this painting in the days leading up to the exhibition, and Gómez de Liaño’s subsequent participation in them. The Truck (We'll be Arriving Later, About Five O'clock) represents an interpretive game that brings to mind some of the techniques of Surrealism in its attempt to unravel the meaning of strokes and forms that appear in the composition. Gómez de Liaño’s wrote how Dalí synthesised the content of the work, stressing that: “What is seen in that interior is nothing more than an everyday scene in a removal truck, which mixes the most banal objects, covered in dirt, with the most luxurious.” Moving from the plane of perception to the plane of interpretation, the artist also offered this explanation of the work: “Everyone has their own interpretation, which is always the image and projection of that person. Each person sees themselves. Ultimately, we are making self-portraits in one way or another.”

Ruth Gallego Fernández