Mundus Imaginalis - Installation View

Mundus Imaginalis - Installation View 2016

TACIT CONTEMPORARY ART, Melbourne

November 30 - December 18, 2016

Dimensions Variable (spanning three walls 3 metres high)

“The Sufi idea of “Mundus Imaginalis” is what one might describe today as the collective unconscious containing the archetypal forms of the psyche. These move beyond the emotionally charged impressions of the personal unconscious.

This ‘field’ is what has drawn me into the making of art and the desire to find a fluent and forthright method that will communicate and share this imagined place.
I began making large-scale works on paper, painted with gouache, three years ago whilst on residency in Leipzig, Germany. With the roots of the Grimm Brothers all around me, I began using and expanding on the idea of the cut-out and the childhood game of paper dolls to communicate the many layers of identity in flux.

The works are usually figurative, patched and pasted together using digital collage at first. The subjects are male, female, animal, and object - and usually a mixture of all these. Eventually they are scaled up and painted almost life-size in monochrome, which I have found serves quite well to unite the complexity of the image. The paintings are intentionally ambiguous, using playful and surreal concepts along with realist technique to create symbolic maps of the psyche.

Whilst painting these trompe l’oeil collages on paper, the opportunity to take things a step further arose with the one to exhibit at Tacit Contemporary Art. I had only three months to work. The idea possessed me to create a walk-in experience of how I wanted to feel being towered over, ‘walking with the gods’. It is a chance to stretch my oeuvre, to play with ideas that have been playing with me on the periphery of my picture making days as I was working in my studio, having started to feel that I would like to do something more. It is a progression that has only fully seen the light whilst setting up in this gallery. It is a work in progress.”

Photograph by Christian Capurro