The cruelty of life is only equaled by art… I used to search a lot in the paths of art for what could express what was going on inside me and my view of the world, but I was always faced with unfree spaces, spaces depicted by religion or what is connected with it..
My imagination was always trapped. When I dive into the past with deep sadness..
I did not know that imagination can lead us to a better future until I became acquainted with surrealism.
Closed areas of my subconscious began to open up to me.
I had never known these closed areas of my subconscious mind before.
I did not have complete freedom of expression with my body, and now I do.
Surrealism is a systematic breaking of the boundaries of reality, the body, society and religion.
Also, I was afraid to delve into fields that I had not studied or practiced, such as drawing, photography and cinema, but Surrealism turned me into an active person who thirsted for all kinds of arts.
I am not only a surrealist artist, I also owe a lot to surrealism… Reconciliation with the unconscious mind can change the world for the better… and it can be an iron wall stands against all life’s difficulties.
Linking and developing science and keeping pace with technological development and the subconscious freedom are able to create a better world.
This is surrealism for me
written by Ghadah Kamal
Ghadah Kamal is a surrealist visual artist, writer, and poet…Coordinator of performances and workshops and cinema screenings of The international exhibition of surrealism Cairo Saint-Cirq-Lapopie and Echoes of Contemporary Surrealism Exhibition / Alexandria and founding member of the Middle East and North Africa Surrealist Group..Founding member of the Chrysopoeia surrealist union. Editor of the Surrealist Cities section of the Room surrealist magazine and editor at Sulfur Surrealist Jungle.
I am a multidisciplinary visual artist interested in painting, alternative sculpting, photography, digital art, collage and mixed media arts. I held my first solo painting exhibition at the age of 14 at Al Gezira Arts Center and have since participated in multiple art workshops and collaborations. I recently graduated from MSA University faculty of Arts & Design majoring in Cinema and Theatre.
Most of my work explores the theme of ‘play’ as a form of resistance. Further expanding and searching how the visual identities of my various roots all meet in a space that feeds on contemporary imagery and ideals.
Coming from a culturally rich background I am drawn to the visual richness of my city Cairo, particularly the slums where street art happens accidentally as a coincidence unravelling the many great textures and layers of the city, as well as having family roots in Upper Egypt and Delta, I began exploring the relationship between the urban and rural space and how it can be visually contextualized.
My inner child holds the pencils, untangling all the fears that have accumulated within my head and sarcastically mocks them. My inner child giggles and makes all the decisions now. I can only contemplate from afar ,a foreign spectator, as I watch dreams from my subconscious unfold and my inner child continues to laugh at me.
The Human world intersects with those of animals, plants and the spirit world which is gestured towards. There are also beings halfway between these worlds—transitional beings with the ability to move through these different worlds with ease. Multiple time periods intersect & the world of myth and the past blends with the present-day time of contemporary reality.
Erik Volet
Reclining nude
Beggars Banquet
Woman in Blue Shawl and Poet’s Dream
Language of the Birds
Erik Volet (b. 1980) is a painter & illustrator from Canada who has exhibited in Canada, the US & Europe. As well as producing paintings he has published art books, made zines, illustrated books, and maintained a consistent involvement with painting murals on the street and in the public sphere. Influences, which continue to be important to his art practice are comic book art, graffiti, hip hop culture as well as surrealist theory and practice.
Richard Gessner’s fiction has been published in Air Fish: an anthology of speculative work, Rampike, Ice River, Coe Review, Another Chicago Magazine, Happy, The Act, Sein und Werden, Skidrow Penthouse, The Pannus Index, Fiction International and many other magazines. A collection, Excerpts from the Diary of a Neanderthal Dilettante & The Man in the Couch was published by Bomb Shelter Props. Gessner’s drawings and paintings have appeared in Raw Vision, Courier News, Asbury Park Press, Rampike, Skidrow Penthouse, and exhibited at Pleiades Gallery, Hamilton Street Gallery, Cry Baby Gallery, The Court Gallery and the Donald B. Palmer Museum. Richard wrote The Conduit and Other Visionary Tales of Morphing Whimsy. He lives in Montclair, New Jersey.
The Conduit and Other Visionary Tales of Morphing WhimsyAudible
self fee of a phantom self. oil/collage Mitchell Pluto
Afterword
We believe we are conscious but we are continuously unconscious.
The eye is the window to the brain and there sits the optic chiasm. A cross current chessboard of visual information. In ancient China, King Wen changed three lines into six lines to form 64 hexagrams in his book called The Book of Changes. Ironically there are 64 arrangements in DNA and 64 squares on the chessboard.
Synchronicity?
Jesus, all the time I spent believing in a historical Laoz and come to find out there’s no historical race either.
these our the last days of being a primate. Don’t worry we still have cuspids
Everything must be uploaded|
…creating a record print of a finger swipe from phone screen| CHECK
…the gesticulation wavelengths of our voice from phone calls| CHECK
…iris scan captured from viewing screen| CHECK
tell us what’s on your mind| CHECK
This device and artificial Intelligence will marginalize the future of man’s ego. After all man is an animal guided by objects, why not be a primate whose experience is organized and interrupted by the phone?
isn’t it working already?
Who is on the other side of the screen?
A narcissistic shark that feeds remotely on a colony of brains and uses the appearance of a woman as a lure
Now A Word From Our Sponsor
We would like to salute our patron Walt and his 1958 Disney film White Wilderness who graciously staged and contrived the impression of a massive lemming suicide. Now back to our show.
(C) April 8, 2023 written by Mitchell Pluto
I would like to thank my friend, Richard Gessner for collaborating and creating some writing to interpret my painting
A Pan-Hellenic trinket, designed to mollify the curious, was given to me by a shadowy agency of relatives of the unknown passing in the night.
The trinket is a translucent diorama of my grandfathers’ Diner, 2’’ long, 1’’ wide, to fit on a key chain or small novelty display shelf.
As if under a microscope, the chronological history of Panayiotis Konstantinos Stratigakis is visible through the roof of the miniature diner. Doric pillars on rows of coffee cups vanish in the horizon of countertop covered with displays of spanakopita, kalamata olive feta cheese salads and baklava.
When I shake the diner in my fist, tiny figurines of my grandfather light up, linking arms in a sirtaki dance accompanied by the sounds of a tiny red bazouki player. Valiantly flashing neon lights of blue and white striped patterns of the Greek flag move up and down. The diner, highlighting his personal and national history.
At the front entrance of the diner, stands the rocky terrain Of the Pelloponnesian peninsula where my ancestors have lived for thousands of years. There’s 400 years of Ottoman rule, subjugation and bloodshed between Greek and Turk. A Greek ancestors’ gold sword slashing the carotid artery of an Ottoman overlord glows like a beacon of hope, heralding the victory of the Greek war of Independence. The port of Piraeus, from where my grandfather sailed to America is then visible, followed by a heroic image of my grandfather as a tall handsome young man setting foot on American soil for the first time. His rapid rise in socioeconomic class represented by the the elite prep schools where he sent his promising sons. An honorable image of Panayiotis in middle age as a pillar of the community, a leader in the Greek Orthodox Church glows, emitting rays of light in the middle of the diner.
Suddenly I notice there’s evidence of tampering in the diner diorama. Tiny diagonal fissures crisscross the clear lucite windows and roof, where significant parts of my grandfathers’ history had been removed. Paid off micro vandals with precision saws cut out slices of his life, hushed up buried secrets were blurred, then erased. Walls of shame pancaked on top of each other, horrid character flaws were sugar coated and thus rendered innocuous. The inflamed canker sores jutting from my grandfathers’ conscience, were filed down with chisels then surgically excised. The crater scars remaining were spackled over with dreamy blue tourist’ brochure views of the Aegean Sea.
I attempt to return my pan Hellenic trinket to the agency of unknown relatives, to show them the evidence of tampering, to retrieve the missing slices of my grandfathers’ life, to get a refund or replacement diner diorama, however the agency of unknown relatives were nowhere to be found.
But soon in the gray dawn of an early spring morning, the missing slices of my grandfathers’ life were revealed. Over the cooing of a sandalwood morning dove, could be heard the voice of my grandfather anglicizing his last name to Sherwood because Stratigakis sounded too much like Streptococcus. “Streptogakis” had associations which were not good for business. Or he was hiding, and wanted to vanish without a trace. Elusive and transient as the wind. In the lucidity of the first light of the day, floating on the breeze, was a vision of my grandfathers’ swarthy muscular body enveloping my pale 15 year old grandmother, a non-Greek girl. It was mere sport to take the girls’ virginity, but when she got pregnant, my grandfather vanished and was never heard from ever again. My teenaged grandmother was burdened with an illegitimate child she never wanted. My mother had Greek features, swarthy skin, dark eyes and hair, like her father. She grew up fatherless in poverty.
Then it occurred to me to ask Panayiotis Stratigakis
“where was your democracy then?”
And to ask
“how do you reconcile being a pillar of your community with being a deadbeat and statutory rapist?”
But my grandfather was long gone like my mother into the eternal beyond.
Someone had to bear witness for my mother, because no-one else cared or remembered. And I realized that I was Greek by ill gotten gains. A grandfather who didn’t acknowledge his own daughter, my mother.
As I was the grandson of a statutory rapist, son of a bastard, the dishonor Panayiotis cast on my mother was too much to bear. In a misguided attempt at rectification, I got between many macho Greeks and their wives and daughters, provoking them to “fight me like a man”
But the dishonor Panayiotis cast on my mother and her memory, still lingered.
The Pan-Hellenic trinket felt infinitely light on my key chain. But it was heavy with my mothers’ unresolved conflicts. I felt burdened by the weight of it.
The trinket was a family heirloom, something as rare as a comet that passes by only every 10,000 years. But I had the need to be rid of it, it didn’t mollify my curiosity as the agency of unknown relatives had intended.
To break free of the curse afflicting my family, restore my mothers’ honor and undo the defilement of my own blood, I cupped the trinket in my left hand and cast it with all my might, high into the sky, the trinket traveling far, vanishing from sight over the Peloponnesian peninsula in Greece where my ancestors have lived for thousands of years.
“Greek in the wind” (C) 2020 By Richard Gessner
Richard Gessner’s fiction has been published in Air Fish: an anthology of speculative work, Rampike, Ice River, Coe Review, Another Chicago Magazine, Happy, The Act, Sein und Werden, Skidrow Penthouse, The Pannus Index, Fiction International and many other magazines. A collection, Excerpts from the Diary of a Neanderthal Dilettante & The Man in the Couch was published by Bomb Shelter Props. Gessner’s drawings and paintings have appeared in Raw Vision, Courier News, Asbury Park Press, Rampike, Skidrow Penthouse, and exhibited at Pleiades Gallery, Hamilton Street Gallery, Cry Baby Gallery, The Court Gallery and the Donald B. Palmer Museum. Richard wrote The Conduit and Other Visionary Tales of Morphing Whimsy. He lives in Montclair, New Jersey.
The Conduit and Other Visionary Tales of Morphing WhimsyAudible
THIS WRITING IS AN AUTHORIZED DUPLICATION WITH PERMISSION AND EXPRESSED CONSENT
In November 2022 I invited Tadeusz Baranowski to talk a little bit about his life and his work. Tadeuszu graciously accepted which I am very grateful for, his thoughts on his life and abstract painting can be found here in Hidden Motion.
Tadeusz’s 2023 show organized by the Auschwitz Culture Center. Poster by Jarek Składanek
While known internationally for his original comic books, Tadeusz also paints Non-Obvious Painting that emphasizes free and spontaneous appearing expressions. Tadeusz’s paintings are deliberately built by a technique that uses wood, fabric, polystyrene, acrylics, and oils. One painting sometimes takes many months.
I spent several hours looking at Tadeusz’s work which I found universally appealing. Abstraction has a reputation that is not clearly understood like understanding quantum foam, synchronicity and the the nature of nothing. I think Tadeusz Baranowski’s paintings are a release of energy in a still life. There is no narrative or conventional images. There is a sense of time somewhere. The paintings convey a space scape with unidentified forces. These interactions influence the surface and time that contains them. Usually these tensions are dynamic, sometimes explosive, but firmly positioned so we can consciously see them. When I look into these paintings I apprehend different emotional and cognitive states. Each painting is worth meditating on.
Through our correspondence in email Tadeusz and I immediately found we shared a common love and respect of nature. Tadeusz mentioned trips to the Masurian country with his wife Anna. He said he currently lived next to a forest near Warsaw, Poland. Tadeusz considers himself a lone wolf in the universe. He enjoys swimming as a contemplative activity. A prolific amount of nature photos can be found on Tadeusz’s Facebook page. The photos capture a rhythm and pattern of nature. I speculate Tadeusz’s photos of flowing water, broken trees, flowers and insects may have provided a scaffolding or study for his paintings. Tadeusz Baranowski’s show was curated by Magdalena Grochowska and will be shown from February 10th to March 14, 2023 at the Oświęcimskie Centrum Kultury
Director of OCK, Monika .wi ,tek-Smrek, curator Magdalena Grochowskaand Tadeusz Baranowski
René Ortega utiliza fórmulas de liminalidad para iniciar al espectador a experimentar los misterios del inframundo. Hay una puerta de flores, una escalera de anillos a túneles, afinada con un aro de colores. Todo esto está aquí dentro de los secretos de nuestra tierra. En estos pasos buscamos un centro que ya es un estado completo, un lugar unido por los opuestos e igual a sí mismo. René agrega esquinas al círculo giratorio para crear una faceta para ver otros espacios y otros tiempos.
Mitchell Pluto
TIERRA PROFUNDA
Mi enfoque se enfatiza en la búsqueda de las respuestas transcendentales las problemáticas ecológicas y sociales de la humanidad que enfrentamos actualmente.
Con mis obras pretendo hacer conciencia para situar al ser humano como parte importante de la naturaleza es el volver encontrándose con muestro yo interno y nuestros sentidos que se encuentran en un estado dormido es el volver a mirar y observar como un niño para situarnos en las profundidades de los infinitos subsuelos y planos de tierra imaginaria de mundos micros organismos vivos subterráneos que se transmutan constantemente en máquinas orgánicas voladoras y así te llevo transportándote a mi imaginario poético donde danzan líneas interminables y planos de vida que se juntan y separan al mismo tiempo incansable búsqueda de lo desconocido como las estrellas y la naturaleza transmutando a infinitos planos profundo de colores y formas que voy realizando atreves de esta incansable y cambiante movimiento y sonido de la vida.
René Ortega, fue uno de los ganadores en la bienal internacional de arte contemporáneo 3 de octubre de 2022. René ha expuesto obra en Chile y Argentina. Está involucrado en muchos programas de arte cultural que se han relacionado con hospitales, niños y la enseñanza del arte profesionalmente. Su muestra más reciente fue Mental Labyrinths en la galería de arte del Centro Cultural Til Til el 18 de junio de 2022.
“Mi preocupación es la figura humana como sentimiento de estados primitivos e irracionales, cuyo punto principal son las cabezas, pensamiento universal de la creación del hombre y centro del universo. Todo ello condujo a una mutación del lenguaje plástico y pictórico”.
BLENDED IN THE HOURS From the place where the abrupt sound of the loica ventures
(1) the evanescence of your future breath appears among the vegetation that hides your name and the blue and gray stones of the primal mystery there I will drink from the mist that shouts the perpendicular miracle the only reason at all that moistens the vegetal belly of the beloved and shines the incessant desire. How long does the star take to announce your coming? or there will be no signs in this already long life of chordates
(2) while the empty horn waits for its winds and the opaque flame of sleep leans into oblivion
(1) Signature and unpredictable bird before being (A) bird in the light areas that are shaken by the wind mythical and loving red that drew a smile on a child to open the celestial fields of my pupil that stirred my early neurotransmitters before the new cycle (B) (A) Before being Before discriminating the gray hours from the clear ones I inhabited the only and always proud clarity of my imaginary friend (B) New cycle My lymph is rocked by the wind in a theater of new opportunities those that favor the sweetness of the coots of sober stride mating in the repetition of miracles so that the aromas perpetuate my arcane name and the wandering clouds welcome their polar persistence. I had the option of ascending to lightning by the cosmic warp where perhaps the root of the word would have questioned in coming times of etheric colors where time would have curved for your eyes and I would raise your elusive silhouette that lies in the angle of a sunset irretrievably withers the thaumaturgical vowel (B1) as simple as a smile or the collapse of a galaxy since everything is corresponding and apparent with its prodigious lightness (B2) Like a breath from the forest.
TRAVEL I went down to the inside of your belly caressing the rafters of your cosmic cloud the one that received me with the aroma of the sacred bulbs. There you were the clear love of wood and the vegetal wisdom that embraces the ancient verb when the wind ceases its journey on the shoulders of the floral liturgy How many skies inhabit your seed that furrows the seer’s eye? Is there a niche of smoke that hides your salty voice? Or simply the root of everything has its home in that mystery.
Each step collects behind you, the daffodils that inevitably lose your mark the one that wanders in the deep sands that in the empire of shadows shelters you. The messenger has a singular noise I’ll feel it that dreadful day I will know then that the epitaphs for the sepulcher arrive, where nothing else needs to be done, the metal swallows are an illusory replacement, since the truths remained in the lock, and blind to certainties, I only rest for a few moments to give me strength in the pilgrim sea, the one who confuses the epistolary tides and enjoys seemingly innocuous sacrifices.
I will kiss your lips according to the prophecy
while the breeze will speak the unfinished language
And you will see me with your green eyes
that are not green
are brown
But when you laugh they turn green
and you can draw a different morning
with an approximate solstice
with snakes in the window,
so my useless life becomes useful
because I’m a hobo of solar systems
and I become a wanderer in your body,
as a geographer of your corpse altar
and intruder in your zodiac cenith.
At this moment the end of the thread
talk about the miracle of one day
unrepeatable and mild luck
How strange of an eclipse
under the brief abyssal tides
like ghostly cardamoms approaching
in the deserts of disease
appealing to the late corrections
as it did for millions of years
moss persistence with its epicness
selecting the right humidity
with your organic and fruity hug
in that I put my hope
in what you find in front of your eyes
because I am the one who reads in the borrascas
as I advance toward your directions
who fires violent canines
before those who offend you
to heal that sadness
that leaves the middle of the night when you slip
inevitably and persistently beneath
out the door.
Chandelier in the mornings
this useless armor
And the leaves are blank
soaking up her violently dance
they burn in front of the cabinets of dubious origin.
I hear the birds giving birth to the woods, in the upper angles of a nebula.
At this moment the end of the thread talk about the miracle of one day unrepeatable and mild luck How strange of an eclipse under the brief abyssal tides like ghostly cardamoms approaching in the deserts of disease appealing to the late corrections as it did for millions of years moss persistence with its epicness selecting the right humidity with your organic and fruity hug in that I put my hope in what you find in front of your eyes because I am the one who reads in the borrascas as I advance toward your directions who fires violent canines before those who offend you to heal that sadness that leaves the middle of the night when you slip inevitably and persistently beneath out the door.
Featured Image: “Beyond the visible world is the non-Euclidean horizon for the dragonfly” acrylic and ink on 250 gm Fabriano paper by Enrique De Santiago
Huge old stars leaning out of the horizontal cobblestone sheets, were dictated by an ancient manual of glorious epic forms where I did not read the cunning locks, from there fall lights like eagles what they hang before your pale fortifications and despite the fact that I descend without air I cling to the dissected edges of this abyss walking away from the waves of floral promises with summer mentions that anoint you.
The amaranth silence rocks the star again and like the silent lymph you seek to break beyond the fundamental shell the one that you came to know in a primitive way in the sweet stays of belief.
Blows the hydrogen on the leaves and many cycles are enough for oblivion, while the trees stand because they keep their memory in the roots, to later give shelter to life vertical. I am the extended earth, I still have memories of that Winter will come without you realizing it.
The specificity of the meander winding secret of the air like the grass with its distant star.
Mitchell Pluto 