"Le parfum est la forme la plus intense du souvenir."
— Jean-Paul Guerlain
Featuring works by Fuco Ueda, Zoe Byland, Masakatsu Sashie, Chizu Wada, John Brophy, Soslan Sosiev, Liz Flores, Saner, Ciou, Kazuki Takamatsu, Mattia Barbalaco, Matteo Casali, Jesus Aguado, Kana Tsumura and Maruyama Yunna.
Dreams are perhaps the only place where memory acquires a scent, emotions become landscapes, and the invisible takes form.
More than a century after André Breton identified the dream as one of the most fertile territories for artistic and intellectual exploration, its mystery remains largely intact. Neither fully belonging to memory nor imagination, neither entirely personal nor universal, the dream inhabits an intermediate realm where sensations, emotions, desires and recollections converge into forms that escape the logic of waking life.
La Matière du Rêve originates from this liminal territory. The exhibition proposes an investigation into the dream not merely as a psychological phenomenon or a source of imagery, but as a living substance—a mutable and elusive matter from which visions, symbols and emotional realities emerge. Here, the dream is understood as a creative force capable of generating meaning before language, reason or narrative intervene.
The title itself evokes a paradox. How can a dream possess matter? Yet throughout the history of art, philosophy and literature, artists and thinkers have repeatedly sought to give form to the invisible. From the oneiric worlds of Symbolism to the revolutionary ambitions of Surrealism, from Renaissance memory theatres to contemporary explorations of consciousness, the dream has been approached as a privileged site of revelation, where hidden structures of the self become perceptible.
Breton regarded dreams as a gateway to a superior reality—a realm where contradictions dissolve and unexpected associations reveal deeper truths. His concept of surreality was not conceived as an escape from the world, but as an expansion of it. In a similar way, La Matière du Rêve considers the dream as an active dimension of experience: a place where memory, desire, intuition and imagination continuously negotiate new possibilities of existence.
This understanding finds echoes in the writings of Gaston Bachelard, who described imagination not as a faculty of reproduction but as a force of transformation. For Bachelard, poetic images emerge from profound emotional and sensory experiences, generating spaces that are simultaneously intimate and universal. Dreams, like poetry, do not describe reality—they reinvent it.
The exhibition also resonates with Marcel Proust's reflections on involuntary memory. His celebrated meditation on memory revealed how a taste, a scent or a fleeting sensation can suddenly unlock entire worlds concealed within consciousness. Dreams operate through a similar mechanism. Images surface unexpectedly; forgotten memories return transformed; emotional truths manifest themselves through symbols rather than facts. Like memory itself, the dream does not preserve reality—it recreates it.
This relationship between image and memory recalls Aby Warburg's notion of the Nachleben, the survival of images across time. Dreams function in a similar way, gathering fragments from different temporalities and allowing ancient symbols, personal memories and collective myths to coexist within a single mental landscape. Likewise, Carl Gustav Jung understood dream imagery as a manifestation of archetypal structures shared across humanity, connecting individual experience to collective memory through a language of symbols.
Underlying these perspectives is Henri Bergson's conception of memory as a continuous flow rather than a fixed archive. The past never truly disappears; it remains latent within us, waiting to be reactivated through sensation, emotion or intuition. Walter Benjamin would later describe similar moments as flashes in which past and present suddenly converge, producing unexpected constellations of meaning. The dream becomes one of the privileged spaces where such encounters occur.
Yet La Matière du Rêve is concerned not only with the dream as image, but with the dream as a profoundly synesthetic experience.
Dreams rarely unfold through vision alone. They are woven from sensations that exceed the boundaries of sight: the memory of a fragrance encountered decades earlier, the texture of a forgotten fabric, the taste of a childhood fruit, the echo of a distant melody, the warmth of a vanished embrace. Within the dream state, the senses become fluid and permeable, merging into a field of associations where emotions are experienced simultaneously as image, scent, sound, touch and atmosphere.
In this sense, the exhibition echoes the Symbolist notion of correspondences, where colours, sounds and perfumes communicate through invisible affinities. Contemporary neuroscience has similarly demonstrated that memory itself is profoundly multisensory. Experiences are not stored as isolated facts but as constellations of perceptions, emotions and bodily sensations. Dreams reactivate these fragments, recomposing them into new narratives and unexpected encounters.
Particularly significant within the exhibition is the presence of several Japanese artists whose practices resonate with cultural conceptions of dreaming that differ from Western psychoanalytic traditions. The Japanese notion of yume extends beyond the dream as nocturnal narrative, encompassing aspiration, vision and poetic projection. Likewise, the concept of ma—the meaningful interval between forms, events and perceptions—suggests that meaning often resides not in what is shown but in what remains suspended, absent or implied. Such sensibilities permeate many of the works presented, where silence, ambiguity and incompleteness become fertile creative forces.
Bringing together a diverse group of international artists, La Matière du Rêve explores these intersections between memory, imagination and perception. Across painting, drawing and sculpture, the selected works navigate territories where reality and fantasy become inseparable. Familiar forms dissolve into dreamlike landscapes; identities fragment and reassemble; nature becomes metaphor; architectures transform into psychological spaces.
The exhibition unfolds as an immersive constellation of emotional states rather than a linear narrative. Each artist approaches the dream from a distinct perspective, yet all participate in a shared investigation into the translation of the intangible. Their works function as visual equivalents of dream mechanisms: condensation, displacement, metamorphosis and free association. Images appear suspended between recognition and mystery, inviting viewers to abandon rational certainty and embrace ambiguity.
At its core, La Matière du Rêve proposes a reflection on what may be described as the materiality of the immaterial. Long before dreams become images, they exist as atmospheres: traces of perfumes, echoes of voices, fragments of forgotten places, emotional residues of encounters and desires. Like scent, they resist precise definition while retaining an extraordinary power to transport us across time and space.
The artworks gathered here seek to give body to experiences that ordinarily evade representation: longing, nostalgia, wonder, melancholy, desire and hope. Through visual language they transform fleeting emotional states into forms that can be contemplated, shared and remembered.
This first chapter of La Matière du Rêve opens in London on 9 July 2026 and inaugurates a larger curatorial project unfolding across two chapters. While Part One focuses on the emergence of dream imagery and the poetic embodiment of interior landscapes, the second chapter, opening in November 2026, will expand this exploration through the inclusion of additional international artists and further investigations into the relationships between imagination, memory and perception.
At a time increasingly governed by measurable realities, accelerated attention and the demand for certainty, La Matière du Rêve reclaims the dream as one of humanity's last spaces of radical freedom. A territory where categories dissolve, temporal boundaries collapse and emotions acquire form; where memory transforms into image, sensation becomes narrative, and imagination reveals itself not as an escape from reality, but as one of its deepest and most essential dimensions.
