Everyday delusions
Dream images often transcend the humanly possible and do whatever they want with time, space, form, color—what we understand as real. Many of our dreams could easily pass for a multi-million-dollar movie in which anything 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 facing a blank page or canvas? This collection of art prints seeks to offer dreamlike images that actually emerge from a brain willing to "delirious" while awake. To force the imagination, in the surrealist understanding that it is unforgiving and linked to chance and the marvelous.
In a passage from The Songs of Maldoror by the Count of Lautréamont, the poet recounts his 30-year struggle against falling asleep. For him, a dreamer “is a breathing corpse” 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 struggle against sleep, says Julio Cortázar, is knowledge in the same way as a law of thermodynamics.
Lautréamont himself "formulated" in the same book a poetic equation that would serve decades later as the quintessence of the collage 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. We will delirious while awake.
Daily Delusions
By Alfredo Quintana