OLE GOLDT

About
recent and upcoming
     exhibitions

Contact
Instagram

Wallflower, a settembre

Merve Ceylan, Ole Goldt
Galleria ACAPPELLA, Napoli, Italy
26.09 - 05.11.2025

Photos: Danilo Donzelli Photography, Acappella.
Courtesy of the artist. An anthology. A selection of nocturnal flowers and their awakening

In ancient Greece, the rational act of choosing “beautiful things” was linked to the verb légō ‘I choose’ and ánthos ‘flower’. The selective concept of ‘anthology’ is closely connected to free will, unlike dreams, which are, in Freudian thought, “disguised realisations of a person's unconscious, instinctual desires”. However, Andreasen's investigation into creativity combines two opposing schools of thought: “When I am, so to speak, completely within myself (...), my ideas flow better and more richly. All this ignites my soul and, provided I am not disturbed, my subject expands, takes shape and becomes defined [...]. All this inventing, this producing, takes place as in a vivid, pleasant dream”.

That nocturnal threshold, where one comes into contact with wonderland, is the dwelling place of the authentic self, a private moment in which the outsider of the outside world becomes an insider of his own inner world: a ‘driver’ of Theo Botschuyver's inflatable ball, immersed in the flow of water but dry to the contortions of his surroundings.

The uninhibited subjective experience in the dreamlike moment is the guardian of an aletheia (truth), literally the ‘removal of the veil’, which, in the light of the first sun, is put away, tinging what has been with atmospheric distance, becoming what remains.

11 p.m.

“I say meaningless words to myself, I see unknown places, I let myself slide down the slope of dreams,” said Borges in the still conscious act of losing consciousness.

00:00

After four macroscopic phases into which sleep is divided, the last phase is called REM, which stands for rapid eye movement, discovered in 1953 by researchers Eugene Aserinsky and Nathaniel Kleitman. A similar movement has been observed when viewing a work of art, whereby the eyes move in scanning movements, called saccades, with the aim of exploring the entire visual environment.

The REM phase, like the attention paid to a work of art, processes and encodes vivid and narrative dreams, making the dreamer mentally active, consuming oxygen and glucose as in the waking state, but experiencing muscle atonia to prevent the dreams from being acted out. In this phase, “the dream becomes life, life becomes dream”, wrote Arthur Schnitzler, referring to his 1897 fantasy.

Ole Goldt is a dreamer, a director of the spirit, who with “anarchic imaginative bizarreness” orchestrates surreal scenes, mysterious hypotheses, visions of his reality. Just as director Akira Kurosawa travels through his existence in “Dreams”, so Goldt delves into the (dis)composed structures of his imagination.

7:00 a.m.

It is time for the manifest dream, that part of the dream that is remembered upon awakening. The raw elements that appear in the mind upon awakening paint a fragile picture: the portions that make up the memory are defined by Charles Brenner as manifest dream content, the final result of unconscious psychic activity that emerges in a discontinuous and first emotional, then sensory manner. The image is not the result of the mental processing of the dream, but the emotion remains alive, bubbling even with your eyes open and triggering the activation of the faded memory of a frame from the dream. The memory, as the conscious content of a single moment, is fossilised in the mind for sixteen to thirty seconds, unlike the persistence of emotional memory.

In La Bottega Oscura, Perec writes of his dreams as “too carefully packaged, too polished, too clean, too clear”, narrating the easy golden trap of artistic rewriting that embellishes the fragility of the mind.

Faithful to the perception of reality as “an upside-down dream” - as Gadda defines lucid wakefulness caressed by the dream world - Merve Ceylan becomes an archaeologist of memory, carefully dusting off the fragments of the past without restoring them, and offering an awakening to the scent of flowers that pass through life but never seem to wilt. 
Just as Federico Fellini was intent on drawing his daily dreamcatcher so as not to lose his “night work”, we can imagine Ceylan painting in the garden of Gabriele d'Annunzio's Villa Cargnacco, at the entrance to which stood the inscription “somnii explanatio”.

“And I fell down and dreamed.” Scheme borrowed from Oskar Kokoschka’s The

Dreaming Youth

“And I fell down and dreamed” [R.E.M. phase]

Our head
is a treasure chest,
nestled between the threads of a blanket
that keeps us safe.
Autumn arrives

And with silken eyes
I listen to a subtle song [waking phase]

The birds feed on
clayey grain
and build nests
that tomorrow they will leave to other wings

Elizabeth Germana Arthur

Prev    Next