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Ryan Saunderson’s body of work is largely a survey on the human mind, it’s displacement and separation to the psyche, and the interpretation of visual language that result from subconscious illusions. Saunderson’s world is that of allegory and dreamscape. His canvases are littered with symbolic references to the pre-war period, inciting a Jungian reference point and a theoretic homage to the Surrealist Greats - Rene Magritte, Salvador Dali and Max Ernst.

 

Saunderson’s impressions are created as a direct manifestation from his own subconscious meanderings – a nod to surrealist automated painting. His narrative bends in to themes of memories and dreams, and the often-fragmented recollection of order and uncanny imagery that fill in gaps where our subconscious mind lacks detail. His works cement his belief in being an interpreter of thought through an indirect lens – is it through the lens of Chimera’s battlefield or Picasso’s Guernica that these paintings lie? There is no doubt Saunderson deduces through a personalised vocabulary of visual metaphors - the moon, the clock, the stage, the curtain, the mirror - archetypes that allude to the discourse of dream interpretation, and which unite the Jungian collective unconscious. 

 

Saunderson articulates a dichotomy between what our mind “sees” and what our eyes see. Are we witness to a memory show reel of our mind, or are we docile puppets in a staged performance? At play is an ​undoubted subliminal coding leaving us with questions ​that seek the associations within the narrative​ of his paintings. The stories embedded in his psyche and interpreted into his paintings, seek to decode the universal mystery of dreams, and that of our subconscious mind – where the surreal and the hypnotic dalliance in between reality and reverie.

 

 

Joey Hespe.