Impossible dreams

Michel Auder, Trisha Donnelly, Yasmine Anlan Huang, W. Rossen, Zygmunt Rytka

Reality reveals fractures within perception itself. As Hal Foster suggests, the surreal does not arrive from outside but emerges from an intensified engagement with the real – an effect of friction between seeing and materiality. The insistent presence of objects, their repetition and opacity, complicates the world, exposing a logic that operates alongside everyday experience. In this view, surrealness becomes an immanent consequence of perception: a moment when the real ceases to be self-evident and begins to function as a condensed, autonomous structure. 

An excess of reality shifts the gaze from pure fascination toward materiality, within which the surreal reveals itself from inside the real. Impossible Dreams uncovers the unobvious possibilities of the ordinary, restoring objects to their complexity and their potential for magical agency, eliciting both aesthetic and cognitive astonishment. Reality becomes indistinguishable from its representations, and the works in the exhibition expose convergences between the real and the unreal. It is precisely through rigorous investigation, repetition, and sustained attention to material that the hidden layers of objects and images emerge – those that usually remain beyond the reach of everyday experience.