Zwischen Traum und Wirklichkeit

Zwischen Traum und Wirklichkeit presents several snake bodies moving across the entire vertical format against an almost black ground. White contours define their curves; fields of blue, red, yellow and white articulate the bodies without fully separating them. They overlap, are cut by the edges and appear to continue beyond the canvas. Each movement remains recognisable, yet its beginning and end cannot be located with certainty.

The snake belongs to Marlon Nikolai’s recurring visual vocabulary. Its connection to transformation arises from shedding: an outer layer is cast off while the organism continues to exist. Shedding thus functions as an archetypal image of change that does not erase identity, but renews its form and boundary. The painting does not illustrate this process. Instead, it transfers its logic to the composition: contours pass into one another, individual bodies lose their closure and become part of a continuous movement.

The black is not a neutral background. It deprives the figures of a stable shared space and determines which passages become visible. Bright lines and saturated colours emerge sharply; elsewhere, contours break off or disappear into the darkness. The eye completes these interruptions, connects separated segments and mentally continues cropped bodies beyond the canvas. Perception therefore appears not as passive reception, but as the active production of coherence.

This is where dream and reality meet. The recognisable snake bodies, their colours and their material presence appear real. Dreamlike is the order in which they emerge: repetition replaces clear individuality, spatial relations remain contradictory, and no figure can be followed in its entirety. Transformation takes place here as a shift in the image’s order: the snake remains recognisable while its individual form continuously dissolves, connects and reconstitutes itself.