Territories of the Imaginal

Territories of the Imaginal is a contemporary surrealist group exhibition that opened this September at Tang Contemporary Art in Hong Kong. Curated by Jirco, the exhibition brings together four contemporary artists from Spain and Latin America — Jordi Díaz Alamà, Marcos Lozano, Juan de la Rica, and Alejandro Pasquale.

In an era of escalating informational density, the image has long surpassed language as a primary organizing mechanism of reality. Through painting as a form of spiritual practice, these artists traverse the realms of reality and fiction, the corporeal and the dreamlike, the visual and the conscious — constructing an open field that interrogates the mechanics of seeing and the dimensions of the psyche.

Despite their distinct stylistic approaches, the four artists converge around a central premise: the image is no longer a vessel of linear narrative but a constantly evolving, shifting, and reinterpretable perceptual structure. Through strategies of composition, symbolism, repetition, and deconstruction, they expand the spiritual boundaries of painting—turning their works into intersections of dream, memory, and myth.

This exhibition does not seek to define a singular visual grammar, but rather to activate the instability within images and the drifting state of the viewer’s psyche. Here, painting becomes not merely a return to form, but an act of refining, questioning, and reconstructing contemporary experience. Each work serves as a mental threshold, leading us to re-sense the border between consciousness and reality, constructing a visual mythology for the present.

Artists

Jordi Díaz Alamà constructs a visual terrain that drifts between dream and reality through intense colors and decentered compositions. Detached from figurative narrative, his paintings present psychological landscapes on the edge of awareness. Space becomes the protagonist, while emotion and light drive the formation of the image. He creates a perceptual tension rooted in the subconscious, drawing viewers into a constantly shifting mental topography.

Marcos Lozano, in contrast, revisits the tradition of Western imagery with delicacy and restraint. Through soft hues and stable composition, he constructs an image space that hovers between memory and fiction—transforming image into a projection of psychological structure. His paintings are not responses to history, but gentle yet profound inquiries into the mechanisms of perception—whispered questions revealing unnamed visual memories.

Juan de la Rica captures our gaze with bold colors and a charged visual language. His static poses and surreal details generate a sense of visual suspension. Blending comic art with pop aesthetics, his style transcends surface lightness. His humor is precise and restrained; decorative colors disguise deeper meaning. In his works, the act of viewing itself becomes a contested structure—at once coolly analytical and sharply critical.

Alejandro Pasquale invites us into a symbolic realm woven from nature and dream. Through a system of masks, vines, and floral motifs, he constructs dense and contemplative perceptual environments where image becomes a converter of consciousness. His compositions are lucid yet resist interpretation, forming gateways into the subconscious. In this multivalent iconography, viewers are led to slowly traverse symbolic terrain, rethinking the boundaries between perception and being.

Through these rich and multifaceted pictorial practices, the exhibition unveils a state of spiritual image-making in constant generation—not aimed at representing reality, but rather situated at the intersection of the visual, psychological, and cultural. The show evokes a renewed awareness of the act of seeing itself.