As Hal Foster suggests, the surreal does not originate externally but emerges from an intensified engagement with the real – it is the result of friction between seeing and materiality. The insistent presence of objects complicates the world – it exposes logic operating parallel to everyday experience. Here the surreal becomes a consequence of perception – a moment when the real begins to function as a condensed and autonomous structure.

Impossible Dreams contemplates the ordinary. A common object or simple image can undoubtedly become unreal as soon as we begin to carefully investigate it. However maybe it is enough to just let it be to experience that something rather known and definite can be so elusive, almost surreal.

The video Voyage to the Center of the Phone Lines by Michel Auder (b. 1945, France) is grounded in a hyperrealist recording that reveals slowly alternating, gazed-out-at images from a quiet beach retreat with the echo of different voices from indeterminate phone conversations. They seem very common and raw, much like the blue sky, sea or horizon captured on the screen. The ambiguity of those conversations, the anonymous cottage with fireplace, tv and a window through which we observe the harmonious wilderness – it all leaves us with a growing need for furtive observation.

Trisha Donnelly’s (b. 1974, California) works oscillate between the concrete and the abstract, in accordance with—and in defiance of— their materiality. The works carry a certain unsettling rhythm, enigmatic precision of gestures, forms, objects. Astoria 36 (2014) is a still image projected on the wall. Here, the form and medium relinquish their presumed function. This cryptic image seems to be overcome by disarray and elusiveness but at the same time it feels very material. The work reveals itself only through attentive observation; it simply is what it is and does not exist solely within the visual register.

Yasmine Anlan Huang (b. 1996, Guangzhou) draws on autobiography and autofiction to examine desires, anxieties, and the micro-dynamics of relationships, which take on a documentary yet almost oneiric quality. Realism in her work generates subtle displacements of meaning: details, objects, and gestures acquire symbolic weight. Huang treats images, objects, and archival materials as structures of memory—responsive, imprecise, and alive. In her practice, the surreal emerges at the very center of the everyday reality.

In his paintings, W. Rossen (b. 1995, the Netherlands) subtly alleviate the seams of mundane life, setting it at a slight angle that disarms the viewing experience. Those overlooked connections, transitions in the artist’s daily existence emphasize Rossen’s persistent fascination with the ordinary. It is usually unclear where the images come from but the artist never insists on banishing the recognition of individual objects, their distinct form and meaning. Rossen’s paintings require looking at everything intently as he often isolates certain details that typically escape notice, allowing them to function as signals from a parallel logic.

In his photographic works, Zygmunt Rytka (1947–2018, Poland) molds the process of observation into a meditative analysis of reality, revealing its internal fractures and paradoxes. What is recorded acquires the aura of something not entirely rational, as if the world itself was producing minor anomalies. The series of photographic works concentrating on nature are at the same time rather obscure to the viewer’s mind but very striking to the eye. He did experiment with the process of perception – we can discuss the repetition or shifts in perspective in his works but here the artist may possibly have had a very ambivalent relationship with the fixed situation so he reformulated it into the object of some kind.