Everyday Delusions - Origin
The inspiration for dream images often transcends what is humanly possible, playing with time, space, form, color—what we understand as reality—however they please. Many of our dreams could easily pass for a movie with a multimillion-dollar budget where anything is possible, or an abstract atmosphere reminiscent of Samuel Beckett's texts. But what happens when we create while awake, in a perfect state of sobriety? What emerges—and from where—when we are not under the influence of drugs or any external stimulus, but simply facing the blank page or canvas? This collection of art prints seeks to offer dreamlike images that actually arise from a brain willing to "delir" while awake. To push the imagination, with the surrealist understanding that it spares no one and is linked to chance and the marvelous.
In a passage from Les Chants de Maldoror, by Comte de Lautréamont, the poet narrates his 30-year struggle against falling asleep. For him, whoever dreams "is a breathing corpse" and is at the mercy of a god who plays with the sleeper's head ("Our door is open to the savage curiosity of the Celestial Bandit"). This episode of the fight against sleep, says Julio Cortázar, is knowledge, just like a law of thermodynamics.
Lautréamont himself "formulated" in the same book a poetic equation that decades later served as the quintessence of collages created by Dadaists and Surrealists. The analogy "beautiful as the chance encounter on a dissecting table of a sewing machine and an umbrella" exemplifies that conscious delirium that allows us to view the world from a distant perspective where—as in dreams—anything is possible. Let us delir while awake.
Everyday Delusions
By Alfredo Quintana