Shows & Fairs

A Lucid Hallucination of the Existence of Things

25, Jan 2019 to 28, Feb 2019
Awake, yet hallucinating - ‘thinking’ a dream. A diaphanous screen alone separating the real from the imagined. It is easily penetrated. The artist, living in that state of lucid hallucination takes the intangible and gives it a perpetual state of existence upon that screen, the canvas. Under his deft fingers, it quickly evolves into a mirror-like fidelity to his dreams.

He is an empowered being. When he picks up the brush to paint, the strokes have a lucidity of worlds imagined as if they really existed - they are about to live on till eternity upon the surface. And who is to counter that? For exist they did, in an imagined reality or a real imagination with a clarity that his outstretched arms could almost reach out and grasp. Through works exhibited here, they let us in into their world of fantasia, of exploration into and beyond the self, a world of extreme perceptual realism where the boundaries of reality, dreams, and hallucinations are truly blurred.

As I put up this show, I wondered if this enhanced imagination is what some of us a blessed with. In a society where substance use and its abuse is rampant and where reality, even when augmented is not good enough or exciting enough, could the very act of creating art becomes a medium for enhanced sensory perception?