Sunday Dalí: Topological Abduction of Europe — Homage to René Thom, 1983. Oil on canvas.

René Thom was a French mathematician who worked in topology. Topology is the branch of mathematics that studies shapes and symmetries of abstract geometric figures. Thom’s research culminated in his 1972 book Structural Stability and Morphogenesis in which he unveiled his catastrophe theory. Thom concluded that in four-dimensional phenomena there are seven possible equilibrium, and thus, seven possible breaks in equilibrium, which Thom called elementary catastrophes. Thom called these: fold, cusp (s-curve), swallow’s tail, butterfly, hyperbolic umbilic, elliptic umbilic, and parabolic umbilic.¹

Topological Abduction features Thom’s equation for the swallows tail in the lower left corner: [V=x⁵/5+(ux³)/3+(vx²)/2+wx]. The words queue d’aronde, which are French for swallow’s tail, appear in the lower left corner and a small graph of the swallow’s tail shape follows the equation. The canvas is fractured by a large seismic crack, which relates to the catastrophe.

This was Dalí’s penultimate painting, and certainly one of his most conceptual.