CORTEX MEMORIES “Philippe Somers”

The seed of my interest in art—and painting in particular—was planted at the age of sixteen by a Dutch-language teacher who made space for art within his lessons. When he introduced Surrealism, everything fell into place. That was the decisive trigger. From then on, creativity was no longer a choice, but a necessity.

Gradually, a personal visual language emerged, along with the realization that I had to be a surrealist. The drawing skills I possessed at a young age made it possible to produce surreal images without rational intervention and to render them realistically with academic precision. This insight was reinforced when I encountered a work by Max Ernst—Castor and Pollution (1923)—whose composition and figure placement were almost identical to a sketch I had made months earlier. Coincidence, or the result of écriture automatique that evokes similar images in different artists?

From that moment on, the intuitive emergence of invisible images, figures, and landscapes became a constant in my work. The paintings are realistic representations of hallucinations produced by the cortex: photographic snapshots of the brain in operation. In this sense, the surrealist artist is not responsible for the origin of the images, but for their technical translation. The conscious creation of beauty is therefore not essential.

Conceptually, the works arise from three perspectives. Works in which the human figure appears as a vulnerable being, trapped within an inescapable machinery and controlled by an omnipresent nature. Bioconstructions: fictitious composite figures, escaped from an inner landscape. And panoramas of a fictional world in which fauna and flora merge into hybrid entities—combinations of proteins and cellulose, beyond any form of classification.

The imagery emerges rapidly, in an uninterrupted flow of daily black-and-white sketches—polaroids of the cortex. These are subsequently translated onto canvas in oil paint, figurative and as realistic as possible. The result is a flat pictorial style without visible brushstrokes. The use of color is based on objective color harmony and complementary relationships.

Although Surrealism emerged at the beginning of the twentieth century, its core principles remain highly relevant today: the exploration of the subconscious, the embrace of the irrational, and the redefinition of reality.