Dreams of Pillow Paintings

It feels like Guim Tió’s paintings come to you as a dream. They have a supernatural quality to them, atmospheric fields where figuration and abstraction slip into one another, inviting prolonged contemplation. The muted palettes and soft-edged forms evoke a quiet, introspective mood, while recurring symbols—solitary figures, backs turned, drifting objects, and ambiguous interiors—act as philosophical touchstones, probing themes of memory, identity, and the passage of time. Through subtle tensions between presence and absence, intimacy and distance, Tió cultivates visual meditations that feel both intimately personal and broadly existential, encouraging viewers to linger and reconsider what the image, and themselves, might reveal.

There is something about the eyes not being seen that I find fascinating. The absence of gaze removes direct engagement with the viewer, redirecting attention inward—to memory (that idea again) and the mind’s private landscapes—and invites projection. My own projection, and other viewer’s, is probably one of utopian “wishes,” like the way you construct a memory the way you wished your past would have been. I do it, you do it, we all do it. You want the memory to look like this, you want the autumn leaves to be falling with heartache, an empty colorful field to have wandered in. It’s a fascinating idea of creating an aesthetic to escapism. And to call the works Pillow Paintings is just about right here.

At François Ghebaly, the works that are presented here were created in “dialogue with the artist’s reading of Sei Shōnagon’s Pillow Book, a 11th-century text recording courtly life during the Heian period in Japan. The text consists of short entries—lists, anecdotes, poems, descriptions, and aphorisms—assembled into a loose, fragmentary notebook rather than a continuous narrative. It is witty work, with extreme, almost simple detail, from seasonal descriptions to personal quarrels, aesthetic judgments, and intimate reflections. I see why Tió would focus on the text, with the glimpses into everyday life, but poetic and loose. Also, the idea of the list:  as the gallery notes, “Tió, himself a lifelong listmaker, organizes his exhibition as a list, where each painting serves as an exploration of a subject that holds personal significance for the artist.” 

Lists, dreams, memories: It’s quite literary. His practice is about delicate observation and restraint: the everyday is elevated into a repository of waning beauty and private longing, and the act of noticing becomes an act of dreaming. They may be sleepy paintings, but these aren’t sleepy ideas. —Evan Pricco