I keep under a glass dome a model of a house I built in my childhood. The only one I have left. I used to build miniature city plans using matches, praline boxes and toothpicks. The most interesting one I remember was made out of a Raffaello box with transparent sides, that doubled as windows, and a large spiral opening, which became both the roof and the entrance to the house. There was no logic nor rules. The design was born with ease and courage. Based on personal experiences of childhood play, I began to build mental cities, and then the thought occurred that I could play by experimenting on canvas, recalling the unadulterated creativity of childhood.
Like dreams that do not follow logical maps or structured cityscapes, the City revealed here is not constrained by real world physics – it is a dream space with its own logic and structure, an intuitively discovered city. One element leads to another, as in dreams, where one scene is effortlessly transformed into another. Here, through construction, the city discovers itself, transforms itself, emerges organically.
A naive joy accompanied me throughout the process, modelling abstract forms directly on the canvas, or with a slight reference from immediate reality, which transformed during execution, recalling the impression of illustrations in the Codex Seraphinianus.
In topography there are boundaries and limits – land meets water, streets divide neighbourhoods – but in this work a partial mapping takes place, the urban landscape refuses to be enclosed. It extends beyond the edges of the composition, suggesting a larger, unseen world. This reflects the open-ended nature of dreams: they have no clear beginning nor end; they transcend space and time.
“Topography of a Dream” explores the idea of fluid space and the creative potential in the process of intuitive construction.