This is a Dream: The Surrealist Houses of Matthias Jung
If the form of a dream is a collage, these houses are the beautiful abodes of that kingdom.
What is a dream? Before entering into the Freudian unconscious folds, dreams are in the form of a collage. They are made up of pieces of things, of premonitions, senses, desires, etc., and that end up forming a huge tapestry with the cultural and anecdotal influence of each dreamer.
Once the monstrous tapestry has been woven – which although beautiful is always a chimera – we can enter. A dream is a house of many bedrooms. And often, almost always, when we wake up we only remember one or two of those rooms, but if we are patient we can reconstruct an entire mansion and almost touch it. This is where the surrealist houses of Matthias Jung come in.
Matthias Jung – a fortunate surname for a dreamer – is a graphic designer but who began to construct ‘surrealist houses’ with scissors and glue when he was a child in his father’s photography laboratory. In January 2015, using Photoshop, his childhood project came back to life and he created a series or oneiric houses that are structurally impossible.
Jung took all of the photographs used in his work, the majority of which were taken in northwestern Germany. “The composition of the individual elements correlates to a logic, as if in a dream”, Jung says on his website. Thus, each house is a collage that not only challenges the perception of space and architecture, but also reconciles the entire ‘monster’ with its parts, and TV antennae with nature, or stained glass with helium balloons.
We can enter Jung’s houses – as nocturnal architects, we are all used to oneiric spaces –; they make perfect sense, perhaps as Escher’s staircases do: if we intellectualize them we finish up staring at an impossible product but at first sight we have been there, we have even lived there already.
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