PLATO

Phantasma

Group Exhibition

March 12 - April 19

PLATO is elated to present Phantasma, a group exhibition exploring imagination, dreams, and illusions in contemporary painting. Featuring works by Alex Sutcliffe, Alic Brock, Darina Karpov, Henry Hung Chang, Jamie Adams, Tang Shuo, and Vickie Vainionpää, the show will open with a public reception in our lower gallery on March 12, from 6–8 PM. It will be on view through April 19. 

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Since time immemorial, great thinkers have debated the nature of imagination. According to the ancient Greek philosopher Plato, fantasy—or phantasma—represents a false appearance, an illusion that deceives the senses and occupies the lowest level of reality. Aristotle, on the other hand, believed that the image-making faculty of the soul (phantasia) makes the higher processes of thinking possible. As he wrote in De Anima, “The soul never thinks without a phantasm.”

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The images that enter our minds from the outside world have changed dramatically over the centuries, expanding our internal cache of archetypal figures and individual phantasmata (the plural of phantasma). The pace and scale at which we consume images have also accelerated. Alongside the centuries-old foundations of printed matter, theater, and fine art, films, online videos, social media posts, and the endless scroll of our own camera rolls now contribute to our vast imaginative picture libraries—inevitably invading our dreams and fantasies.

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Both portraits by Jamie Adams (b. 1961, Pittsburgh, PA) conjure the image of Jean Seberg—a recurring character in his work, perhaps his ultimate phantasma—as her iconic heroine in Jean-Luc Godard’s 1960 film Breathless. In Jeannie’s Blue Suit, the artist depicts her as an English dandy perched on an upholstered armchair; in Mama’s Dream, she lies asleep in her 1960s apartment, dreaming of a circus performer with elongated limbs—or perhaps being dreamed up by him. The presence of a notebook and a curled-up dog, real or illusory, further complicates the scene. Childhood memories, a film crush, current family dynamics, and the specter of art history coexist in quiet harmony—imagination operates in circuitous ways.

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Similarly, but with a distinctly Eastern European sensibility, Darina Karpov (b. 1973, St. Petersburg, Russia)’s emotive and enigmatic paintings weave together memories of childhood adventures in Saint Petersburg—where the artist was surrounded by female family members—with references to Soviet cartoons, cinema, and perhaps nightmares, all blurring into one another.

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Religious imagery—long a constant in art history—appears alongside fantasies and dreams in Henry Hung Chang (b. 1989, Taipei, Taiwan)’s Bonfire. Loosely based on a ritual from Taiwanese folk religion in which devotees burn or launch a replica boat to send off the “Divine Emissaries” to heaven, the watercolor is filled with spiritual symbols and suggestive imagery. The work relates to the artist’s childhood spent in a temple, as well as his queer experience and immigrant journey as an adult.

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Alex Sutcliffe (b. 1997, Chicago, IL) also refers to religious and mythological traditions—both pagan and Christian—in his contemporary reinterpretations of Old Master paintings. Whether depicting the goddess Diana casting the handsome shepherd Endymion into eternal slumber or Biblical fishermen witnessing miraculous events, Sutcliffe stages these scenes within dreamlike atmospheres created through stenciling and painterly blurring that paradoxically evokes digital imagery.

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Technology enters the conversation even more explicitly in Vickie Vainionpää (b. 1992, Toronto, Ontario)’s Diana in the Bath (Excerpt I). Using software that tracks the movement of her gaze across Dirck van der Lisse's 1635 painting with the same name, Vainionpää translates these eye-tracking paths into a sinuous sculptural shape that is simultaneously hard and soft, opaque and reflective, digital and physical. The pastoral scene of frolicking nudes bends the boundary between reality, fantasy, and digital specter.

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Tang Shuo (b. 1986, Guilin, Guangxi, China)’s Lake introduces the artist’s likeness into a magical realist scene that carries both intimacy and myth. Shuo recently cut his hair short, and his ubiquitous, once long-maned character now appears in a cropped, social-media-ready composition while inhabiting an atmosphere that evokes timeless mythological stories.

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Finally, Alic Brock (b. 1992, Dayton, OH)’s Bullseye offers an apotheosis of the exhibition’s themes, blending classic American cinema, digital imagery, magic, and surreal dream logic into a single extraordinary composition meticulously rendered in airbrushed acrylic.

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Phantasma considers painting as a site of apparitions—ghosts of the past, dreams, and desires —both conscious and hidden. Suspended between the specters of mass media, personal memory, and art history, the works in the exhibition propose a space where illusion is neither pure deception nor mere escape. It is a generative force: a meeting point of the external, the internal, and the sublime.