Everyday delusions - Alfredo Quintana

Dream images often transcend what is humanly possible and do whatever they want with time, space, shape, color… what we understand as real. Many of our dreams could easily pass for a movie with a million dollar budget in which everything is possible, or an abstract atmosphere that makes us think of the texts of Samuel Beckett. 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 in front of the blank page or canvas? This collection of art prints seeks to offer dreamlike images that actually arise from a brain willing to “rave” while awake. To force the imagination, in the surrealist understanding that it does not forgive and is linked to chance and the marvelous.
In a passage from The Songs of Maldoror by the Count of Lautréamont, the poet recounts his struggle – for 30 years – against falling asleep. For him, the dreamer “is a breathing corpse” and is at the mercy of a god who plays with the head of the sleeper (“Our door is open to the wild curiosity of the Celestial Bandit”). This episode of the struggle against sleep, says Julio Cortázar, is knowledge like a law of thermodynamics.
 Lautréamont himself “formulated” in the same book a poetic equation that served decades later as the quintessence of the collage created by Dadaists and surrealists. The analogy “beautiful as the chance encounter on a dissection table of a sewing machine and an umbrella” exemplifies that conscious delirium that allows us to look at the world from a distant perspective where – as in dreams – everything is possible. We will delirious while awake.