When Reality Begins to Slip
Gaspar Noé has a way of filming the moment when reality starts to dissolve—when the familiar bends, stretches, or melts into something stranger and more intimate. His dream logic does not mimic real dreams; it mimics the feeling of losing your footing inside your own perception. That sensation has shaped the way I build my surreal figures. When I create posters rooted in these dissolving states, I want the viewer to feel the threshold between what is seen and what is sensed, as though perception were sliding open like a soft, glowing door.
Altered States as Emotional Truth
Noé’s films often hover between consciousness and trance. Colours intensify, camera angles drift, bodies elongate or contract under emotional weight. These altered states reveal truths that rational clarity hides. In my work, I approach symbolic figures the same way: as vessels where emotion distorts form. A silhouette might dissolve into petals, a face might blur into shadow, or a limb might elongate into a ribbon of botanical light. These distortions are not surreal for the sake of strangeness. They echo the way emotion reshapes the self from the inside.
The Soft Geometry of Dissolution
One of the most fascinating aspects of Noé’s dream logic is how geometry becomes fluid. Lines curve unexpectedly, spaces stretch, the frame behaves like a breathing organism. This taught me to let my figures and botanicals melt into each other. Edges soften. Boundaries fade. A symbol might begin as a petal and end as a gesture of the body. The composition becomes a map of emotional dissolution—neither chaotic nor stable, but suspended in a glowing equilibrium.
Figures That Drift Between Worlds
Noé’s characters often move through spaces that feel half-remembered, half-invented, as if transformed by memory or subconscious desire. I want my surreal figures to inhabit that same interstitial world. Their bodies are not fixed; they drift between human, botanical, and atmospheric forms. They glow in ways that do not belong to natural light. They carry the emotional weight of figures who are not entirely present, yet not entirely gone. Posters built around these figures become portals into the dream-state—images that breathe more than they speak.
Colour as a Dissolving Force
In Noé’s dream-sequences, colour often erases logic. Red spreads like heat, green vibrates like a warning, violet coils around the frame like smoke. I use colour with the same dissolving intention. When a figure begins to disappear into a gradient, the colour becomes the story. When a shadow overtakes a face, it becomes an emotional eclipse. When neon bleeds into the petals surrounding a silhouette, it expresses the shifting state of the subconscious. The poster becomes a chromatic threshold rather than a static image.
The Emotional Gravity of Dream-Coded Bodies
Dream-coded bodies do not follow the rules of anatomy—they follow the rules of emotion. Noé understands this deeply, and watching his work taught me to trust emotional anatomy more than physical accuracy. In my art prints, the body becomes a symbol: a torso dissolves into a night-flower, a head becomes a glowing seed, hands stretch like tendrils reaching for something unresolved. These transformations capture the gravity of inner experience. They allow the figure to feel both fragile and immense.
Dissolution as a Form of Clarity
There is a paradox in dream logic: the more a shape dissolves, the clearer its emotional meaning becomes. Dissolution strips away the literal and leaves behind the essence. This is why my surreal posters often lean into fragmentation or visual melting. The viewer intuitively senses the emotional undercurrent—longing, fear, transcendence, awakening—without needing explanation. The image becomes a place where clarity emerges through softness, not precision.
Where Cinema and Surreal Botanica Converge
Ultimately, Gaspar Noé’s dream logic offers not a visual blueprint, but an emotional one. It reminds me that art can reflect the instability of inner experience without losing coherence. It can speak through colour, shape, dissolution, tension.
My surreal figures carry this influence within them. They echo dissolving realities not to disorient, but to reveal the quiet truth that lives beneath our waking selves—a truth that glows, shifts, and breathes in the dream-state of symbolic art.
