The exhibition features works by: Jacopo Pagin, Martha Kicsiny, Noa Verkeyn, Fiona Lutjenhuis, Felix Beaudry, Helena Parys, Diego Latruwe, Eva L’Hoest, Amanda E.Metzger
Curated by Hanna Júlia Erdősi
Vernissage: 23.OCT.26 from 17:00 - 22:00
An awake mind craves safety, and it finds it through observation, interpretation and narration: we look, we make sense of what we see, and we fill out the gaps to complete the narrative. Almost like muscle memory, this habit is always running, quietly regulating the psyche.
But the meanings we assign depend on context and on the rules that hold the physical world together.
In dreams, a small disturbance is enough to undo this notion of consciousness. An object turns up where it does not belong. As shadows falls the wrong way, textures disappear. Bodies swell out of proportion, anchors drift upward, and empty clothes move as if someone were inside them. Without the context that normally fixes its meaning, the object is left on its own, and its signal comes loose.
Once loosened, a signal rarely settles on a neutral meaning, with uncertainty comes doubt and suspicion. A familiar face carries a stranger’s meaning, and an ordinary thing grows heavy with significance while something enormous passes without comment.
This is the idea behind the exhibition’s title. In a dreamscape, contraries are equally true. The same image can be tender and frightening at once, and nothing has to be resolved. What our subconscious communicates can sharply contradict what we perceive in reality, and yet it is no less honest. The selected artworks place familiar objects and subjects in unlikely contexts, play with proportion and (physical) logic just slightly, and release these signifiers from their usual, fixed meanings. They become symbols that no longer behave as the symbols of our waking world should. There is a quiet paradox here: some of our most truthful impressions of the real world reach us in forms that make no sense until we decode them.
There is a lot to discover once this dynamic is acknowledged and embraced. Because the meaning is never fixed, no two people will leave these works with the same reading. What one viewer finds tender, another finds unsettling, and each response says as much about the person looking as about the image itself. The works become a mirror of a quieter kind, one that reflects the associations, memories and private fears and hopes we carry without noticing. To stand in front of them is to watch our own mind reach for a story, and to notice what it reaches for. That experience belongs only to the viewer, and it may be the most honest thing a visual impression has to offer.