Dube Dude Does DalÃ

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by Tess Wheelwright | May 15, 2006 10:00 am

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Posted to: Arts

Hello, DalÃ! That’s how playful art-lovers at a gala event at downtown Chapel Street’s White Space gallery greeted this man (aka Lewis Dube). Read on to see how they reviewed Dube’s impersonation and the hand-signed DalÃ lithographs on display.

p(clear). In celebration of its two-year anniversary and Salvador DalÃ‘s birthday month (the Spanish Surrealist painter would have been 102 this May), White Space fine art gallery opened its second-floor Chapel Street doors to the public on Saturday. Artists, collectors, friends, and passersby dropped in to check out the gallery’s limited-edition, 12-lithograph collection of re-renderings of DalÃ‘s works—like “Don Quixote on an Infinite Landscape,” pictured here.

“He was the greatest Spaniard that never lived!” said Dube of Miguel de Cervantes’ fictional character, the legendary crackpot and hero who so fascinated DalÃ. It might be called Quixote-like vision that inspired the DalÃ gesture making Saturday’s exhibit possible: late in life, the artist began pre-signing blank paper so that autographed prints could continue to come out after his death. “He was very self-promoting,” said Dube, who’s for weeks been studying the person DalÃ was in order to better ape him.

Dube drew a link between DalÃ‘s knack for self-promotion and his own.“I wandered in here off the street looking like Joe Schmoe in T-shirt and jeans,” he said, having never seen the space before. After he heard about the upcoming exhibit, wheels started turning. “Walking out, the self-promotional part of me came out: I thought, do DalÃ!”

Mimicry is not a new art for Dube. “I did Abe Lincoln for 10 years,” the Waterbury-based actor said, lingering a moment out of character to explain how past impersonating experience at presidential libraries, and a summer at Yale’s drama program, led him to his present role. With Quixotic tirelessness for re-imagining himself, Dube has plans for a one-man Van Gogh show next. “Vincent was the Abe Lincoln of art,” he declared.

Saturday gala guests like Ken Ingram (pictured with Dube) were delighted with both the impersonation and the works hanging, which Ingram called “all unbelievable!” Gallery-owner Michelle White introduced “Invisible Face,” the DalÃ in the background between Ingram and Dube, as the most significant of the hand-signed prints, which ranged in price from $1,875 to $10,000. “It’s the real DalÃ-esque imagery.”

Visiting viewers picked their own favorites.

p(clear). Roy Tumblty, an “expressionist” recently moved to New Haven, said he liked “Spectral Horse” best, citing its “animation.”

p(clear). Marnie Flach singled out “Disintegrating Mother and Child.” For her, the work “represents the [child’s] separation from the mother’s comfort, security, and warmth. Of course tomorrow is Mother’s Day: maybe that’s why it’s grabbing.” She noted the figure was weightier and “more grounded on the bottom, and then more angelic up” at the face. “Like you own mother - or how you want your mother to be.”

p(clear). Pastel-artist and Yale-trained doctor Elan Louis liked this “Mother and Child” better. He said he’s all the readier to appreciate these more abstracted experiments in Surrealism after viewing the artist’s super-realistic early works in oil at the Salvador DalÃ Museum in Florida. “He was an incredible draftsman. What you realize is he could make a Rembrandt if he wanted to,” which for Louis made what DalÃ chose to do instead all the more interesting.

The works will be on display at least through June 3, when White Space will prepare for “White Heat,” an exhibit of local artists. “We try to have a blend,” said Michelle White. “We’re not one of these galleries where you go, Gasp, I don’t like any of these!”

Exclamations among Saturday’s small but steady crowds seemed for the most part appreciative. And with a dead-ringer DalÃ wandering among the works perplexing visitors like Lizza Weir (pictured) with presumed DalÃ fragments (“I remember more than I read…”), the whole event was appropriately surreal.

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