If reality transcends the madness of dreams, can we still trust what we see?
From July 7 to October 5, 2025, Fisheye Gallery is taking over its space in Arles with a group exhibition Sous les paupières closes (Under Closed Eyelids), curated by Tess Druot and Anaïs Coudon, bringing together four emerging artists—Nyo Jinyong Lian, Eloïse Labarbe-Lafon, Rose Mihman, and Anna Muller.
Through practices that blend photography, painting, collage, and various visual forms, they take us on a journey that intertwines reality, memory, dreams, and imagination. Their works awaken a contemporary surrealist sensibility, emerging from the cracks between the visible and the invisible, reality and fiction.
By playing with illusion, while preserving the breath of reality, their creations open up a vast field of imagination where parallel worlds and alternative realities materialize. Like an exquisite corpse, the exhibition is composed of fragments of their universes, where each image seems to summon the next, in an endless dialogue.
The work of Chinese photographer Nyo Jinyong Lian oscillates between stability and collapse. In a fragile reality, her images serve as anchors, landmarks for navigating the uncertain world. Inspired by Hans Christian Andersen’s tale The Emperor’s New Clothes, Lian embodies the child who dares to say out loud what adults keep quiet, revealing, with candor and irony, the naked absurdity of reality. By constructing visual fables, she invites us to revisit our perception of reality.
An enigmatic gaze emanating from countless spiraling hands, down to the relaxed young girl trimming a bouquet made of red balloons… The female figures under Lian’s lens appear both detached and impassive, defying any appropriation. In Intrusion (2023), a blood-red wall invades the frame. Through a small wooden window set into the wall, a piercing gaze stares at us, like a giantess ready to bare her claws. This presence radiates an invisible force that shakes all our certainties.
Continuing this quest, Eloïse Labarbe-Lafon, a former film restorer and documentary archive colorist, navigates between reality, dreams, and narrative reconstruction. She repaints her black and white silver prints in oil, using a brush or her fingertips, offering a new spectrum to memory. With this delicate manual gesture, she infuses her images with a vibrant materiality, making her imaginary universe almost palpable. We let ourselves be drawn in, caught in the heart of the whirlwind of illusions she unfolds.
The process of photographing, developing, and then coloring proves to be a therapeutic experience for the artist, especially when it comes to self-portraits. Coloring her images is to open an intimate dialogue between two “selves” from different times, to awaken the other self with the touch of fingers, and to fill inner voids with color. Black and white, pastel tones, and bright hues intertwine, allowing several temporalities to coexist. These dreamlike images compose as many re-enchanted tales of reality as intimate spaces suspended outside of time.
In Rose Mihman‘s work also revolves around self-portraiture, her photographs are extended like veritable pictorial canvases, where anachronism further deepens our distance from reality. A collector of antique objects, she slips into the skin of a time traveler, straight out of the dreamed-of Belle Époque, but never frozen. Her “magic formula” lies in the ingenious alliance between digital and film, giving life to grainy images where period clothing and contemporary body language enter into striking friction.
Committed to the “flaws” of photography, Mihman deliberately rejects traditional aesthetic canons. The disturbing, sometimes violent, figures that populate her images are as much mocking provocations of established norms as they are a radical declaration of female subjectivity. We imagine them humming, freely sketching out a baroque dance in the interstices of time.
In contrast to this expansive energy, Anna Muller‘s works are intended to be contemplative and meditative. Her aesthetic draws on Russian thoroughness, Japanese minimalism, and French photographic training, reflecting a profoundly multicultural intuition. Composed of photographs, paintings, and fashion images, her collages favor line and color, deploying a balanced structure that invites an ethereal and harmonious visual experience.
Her use of images from forgotten magazines has shaped not only her unique visual language, but also constitutes a critical reflection on the era of image overload. By recomposing these materials, Muller weaves a refined link between photography, visual arts, and fashion, blurring the boundaries between these disciplines to create a poetic aesthetic where human and nature intertwine.
Four artists, four voices, four worlds. The feminine gaze is infinitely varied here: piercing, introspective, scrutinizing, contemplative. Beneath closed eyelids, the vision never fades. The artist’s eye becomes a shutter piercing reality: at the moment of closing, the visible transforms into imaginary material and is reborn as an image.
At a time when yesterday’s illusions are becoming today’s reality, contemporary photographic surrealism is no longer content to address only the subconscious and dreams. In this universe where the real and the virtual merge, artists are developing strategies tinged with humor, lightness, and playfulness. Their creations explore new intermediate zones, embodying a subtle eclecticism against the harshness of reality, a gentle but determined response.
Between familiarity and strangeness, ecstasy and melancholy, the exhibition opens like a dreamlike female quartet, a captivating poem of images. It is a collective response to a reality that has become absurd and phantasmagorical, offering a sensitive and resolute perspective on this disconcerting world.
Deng Qiwen
Sous les paupières closes
Fisheye Gallery
19, rue Jouvène, 13200 Arles
Opening Friday, July 11
Opening week, July 7 to 13: Open daily from 11 a.m. to 8 p.m.
July to October: Tuesday to Saturday from 11 a.m. to 7 p.m.
https://fisheyegallery.fr/
