Lucid Rhapsody. Ballad of a Schizophrenic

Distorted, smeared, sweeping. Ghostly bodies rushing past, eyes lurking in every corner. Dizzying visions verging on delirium.

As continuous streams of untethered images and information pass at overwhelming speed, the pace of life exceeds our capacity to process what the eye captures into conscious thought. With invisible structures ever more shaping our desires, behaviours and bodies, lucid sight slowly dissolves. Blurred by saturation, we keep trying, like neurotics, to make sense of the violent flood of impressions, sounds and signs, while everything we see and experience drifts out of focus.

LUCID RHAPSODY—Ballad of a Schizophrenic turns this delirium into a motor of creation. Its title is borrowed from Anti-Oedipus by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, where the figure of the "schizophrenic out for a walk" stands for liberated modes of being, resisting rigid categories of identity, social structures and norms. Desire, unlike in Freudian theory, is not compensation for a lack but a generative force: it links bodies, images and systems, giving rise to an expanded, hallucinatory vision, a heightened form of seeing.

Across paint and sculpture, ghostly figures slide, bodies melt, faces echo themselves, while weightless forms float in a rhapsody of colours and moods, from translucent palettes to feverish yellow light. In the works of Anastasia Bay, Emmanuel Bornstein, Cathrin Hoffmann and Julien Saudubray, everything normativity excludes – be it carnal desires, dystopian visions, fetishes, formlessness or dissociation – unfolds as a creative force, and with it a kind of liberation.

Anastasia Bay's carnivalesque banquet on canvas reads as a parody of the femme fatale, its giant harlequin exposing the patriarchal myths that cast women as delusional. Transfigured by contemporary tragedy, Emmanuel Bornstein's morphing figures emerge as contaminated presences that register the unsettling conditions of the present, while holding onto a fierce radiance. Cathrin Hoffmann's twisting, genderless bodies are caught mid-render between screen and flesh, haunted by shadows that mirror them as projections of the mind. Through repetition and automatic gesture, Julien Saudubray's paintings on canvas and wood evoke metaphysical dimensions, their layers swept, sanded and erased until they hover between appearance and disappearance.

Across all four positions, bodies and shapes thin out, double and dissolve, everything in constant motion, in processes of becoming. Together they sketch a perception that has slipped its moorings: delirious, and yet lucid.

Alexia Timmermans