‘Man needs colour to live; it’s just as necessary an element as fire and water,’ declared French Cubist Fernand Léger. In this spirit, and in light of Opera Gallery’s most recent exhibition Dreaming in Colour, writer Christina Donoghue probes the surreal language of dreams.
It’s been said that 2024 was the year art amped up its fixation with the surreal. Galleries the world over scrambled to pay deference to the movement’s centenary, a century on from André Breton’s infamous 1924 manifesto. Centre Pompidou staged their final blockbuster exhibition before announcing a five-year closure, just as institutions across continents – in cities such as Estonia, Shanghai, Brussels, Texas – hurried through their archives to enact surrealist-themed displays in time for anniversary celebrations. But wait, wasn’t society’s fetish for surrealist thrills already in motion thanks to many a gallery’s response to the fever dream that was the global pandemic? Even before then, art’s fascination with its own surreal-ification was well underway. 2019 alone saw London’s institutions sucked into a surreal void, with the Tate dedicating retrospectives to both Dorothea Tanning and Dora Maar in a matter of months. Still, what about 2016, the year that saw the UK say goodbye to the European Union and America say hello to Donald Trump; a nightmare turn of events that unleashed the dream as subject for intellectual fodder once again? Bear in mind, this is all before ChatGPT slid into everyone’s inbox disguised as “the definitely human-written non-AI culture newsletter you didn’t know you needed.” Surreal isn’t even the word, not least because all of these events are anything but.
So yes, it should come as little surprise that surrealist-inspired exhibitions still run rampant two years on from this momentous 2024 anniversary, in part because our waking world sometimes feels more surreal than our subconscious one. This month alone marks the much-anticipated opening of the V&A’s blockbuster Schiaparelli exhibition, Fashion Becomes Art, as it does the closing of Opera Gallery’s painting group show Dreaming in Colour, both of which have resulted in art and fashion gathering once again to observe, probe, examine, and critique the subject to its heart’s content. That said, one question prevails above all: What new ground is there to cover when it comes to an art form that has dominated for decades?
A fresh take on surrealism is as rare as a chance encounter with Dalí himself, his pet ocelot Babou in tow. That said, it’s not impossible, as Opera Gallery have proved with Dreaming in Colour. Gathering twenty-five contemporary artists, the exhibition pays as much attention to an enriching colour palette as it does the surrealist themes depicted in each artist’s work (melting clocks and sporadically placed eyeballs are only half the story). It’s an idea that, although not necessarily new, has yet to be considered one of the staple components of surrealism, much in the way that dreams are. That said, isn’t it the colour of our dreams as much as the content that pushes them towards the abstract? Sure, visions of an orange tiger while you’re asleep may give rise to theories that you’re facing a threat in your waking life, but the surrealists relied on absurdism as much as they did symbolism. Colour the tiger a midnight blue, and suddenly the explicable and rational becomes perverse, giving rise to new hidden meanings that subject matter otherwise negates.
Viewing surrealism this way is in the gallery’s DNA, as is the desire to look beyond the Bretons, Dalís, and Magrittes of this world in favour of artists whose work doesn’t merely resort to more floating hats and deserted landscapes as a means of tackling the subconscious. Take the Fauvist amorous visions of Marc Chagall, the liberated sculptures of Niki de Saint Phalle, or even the immersive hallucinations of Yayoi Kusama, all of whom have been represented by Opera Gallery in the past. If each of these artists had favoured black and white over the chromatic explosions we best associate with their work, our interpretations would be rather skewed, for it is colour that brings the narrative into sharp focus – not the other way round. You only have to think about Schiaparelli without her Shocking Pink and Picasso without his Prussian Blue to get the picture – in other words, you can’t.
The work of São Paulo-based painter Gustavo Nazareno is a good place to start, thanks to a bulging portfolio of enigmatic oil paintings that bring Afro-Brazilian deities to life. His Dreaming in Colour contribution, the 2025 portrait Eshu, is no exception, relying on vivid pigmentation to enrich key references in his work. ‘I often work with Eshu [a Yoruba deity representing chaos and uncertainty], whose colours are black, red, white, yellow, and blue,’ Nazareno informs me. ‘In this way, colour becomes a way of speaking about the figure itself. It is one of the main elements I use to organise the narrative and build a story around the figure.’
Also included in the exhibition is Xevi Solà, a Spanish painter whose intuitive and figurative artworks lean on colour to shape the viewer’s complex emotional and psychological interpretations of the work. ‘I don’t use colour to describe reality as it appears, but to suggest what it feels like beneath the surface,’ Solà notes, understanding that something as simple as ‘a face, a landscape, or an object can carry an emotional weight that is often invisible’ – colour can then ‘translate that into something perceptible.’ As for where the true colour of daily life comes into play, as far as Solà is concerned, it doesn’t: ‘I’m less concerned with accuracy and more with resonance, what the subject evokes internally,’ the artist clarifies. For him, colour is the message, used to summon a sense of tension, calm, distance or intimacy to help form meaning. ‘By shifting colour relationships, I can alter how a viewer connects to the subject, whether they feel unease, nostalgia, or contemplation. So rather than supporting the image, colour leads it; it guides the viewer toward the essence I am trying to reveal, even if that essence cannot be clearly defined in words.’
What’s most beguiling about Solà’s work is what the artist chooses to conceal versus reveal, each decision wholly intentional in asking the viewer to consider how much they can know about a subject at first glance. Much like the French painter Oh de Laval, whose two works on show revel in lust and desire. But it doesn’t stop there. ‘I like to trick people,’ de Laval tells me. ‘They look at my paintings, and they think they understand, but they don’t. Just because I use a lot of sickly sweet shades of pink in my work doesn’t mean my paintings are for adolescents. It’s only once they really look that they realise a seedier narrative is at play and the macabre comes out to dance.’ For de Laval, colour isn’t simply there to trick one’s mind; it’s about playing with the human condition and the confines of our own imagination, which she feels is shrinking in an AI-dominated age. ‘There are endless reasons as to why we’re so fascinated with surrealism, but despite this collective obsession, we seem to be getting further away from what the original surrealists intended the movement to be. Surrealism was all about what the human mind is capable of, the gloriousness of creativity,’ de Laval tells me. ‘I don’t see that same level of creativity anymore; it’s not just about being a skilled painter but imagining the unimaginable.’ Where there is colour, there is imagination, and when we have AI models that are offering to think for us, we must continue to choose imperfection – in colour, in composition, in life – every time. In the words of French Cubist Fernand Léger, ‘Man needs colour to live; it’s just as necessary an element as fire and water.
