ABOUT THE EXHIBITION - Text by Saša Bogojev

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“Unheimlich is the name for everything that ought to have remained secret and hidden and has come to light.” - Sigmund Freud, Das Unheimliche

 

"Das Unheimliche" (The Uncanny), widely regarded as one of Freud's most influential essays outside clinical psychoanalysis, gives language to a particular kind of discomfort—the eerie feeling of something strangely familiar. This unsettling psychological state can also provoke a sense of ominous anticipation, as if something threatening lurks just beneath the surface. It is precisely this response that Rolan Kay seeks to evoke through his methodically reduced visuals. Rather than conveying it through explicit thematic content, it is the execution—the painterly decisions and pictorial approach—that generates the work’s atmosphere, conceptual tension, and point at its underlying tone.

 

Freud’s seminal ideas opened the door to the eerie, the surreal, and the psychologically charged, shaping how generations of artists approached their subjects and forms. From Dalí’s lifelike figures behaving strangely within disjointed spatial logics to Bacon’s fragmented bodies and distorted, ambiguous identities, these works visualized the psychological tension of things too familiar, too repressed, too real. Echoing this perspective, cinematic treatments of the uncanny tend to avoid gore or shock, instead generating psychological unease by unsettling the familiar—turning mirrors, memories, and human likenesses into quiet sources of dread. Though it may take on different cues and forms today, this particular kind of unease retains its timeless cultural relevance, shaping how we understand AI, humanoid robots, clones, or online personas. Building on the legacy of his predecessors while drawing from his own contemporary experiences and specific points of reference, Kay uses composition and painterly language to cultivate an alienation effect and evoke a sense of the extraordinary.

 

Strongly influenced by the aesthetics of the fantastic, the Chilean artist infuses familiar, comforting imagery with a sense of absence, distortion, or artificiality. Through the repetition of motifs, elements, environments, and compositional structures, he continually expands on the concept, creating coherence and fostering dialogue between the works. At the same time, the revision of similar images emplifies the unsettling atmosphere permeating each of the works. While the basic structure and composition are defined during the sketch phase, it is the painting process itself that charges the visuals with psychological, ambiguous tension—one that still retains a sense of beauty, even glamour. This tension strongly relies on the use of light, which, although uprooted from reality, feels coherent and logical in a plastic and abstract sense. Reminiscent of cinematic stills, the scenes evoke a dramatic effect by distorting forms, producing more abstract, ambiguous, and evocative visual cues. In this sense, the figures are approached as mere forms, stylized in a way that places them on the same level as the background or space, with no clear hierarchy between them. And by doing so, Kay successfully adds confusion and ambiguity to what would otherwise be relatively straightforward tableaux. Returning to the aesthetic of the fantastic, the female subjects reference Jacques Lacan’s concept of phantasmagoric women, which functions not as a real subject but as a "screen" onto which desire is projected. Less about the actual person and more about what is missing and symbolizing what is absent, forbidden, or unknowable in the psyche, they’re embodying the idea that discomfort is rooted not in strangeness, but in things uncomfortably close to home—things we thought were buried deep within.

 

While crucial to the way the image is observed and absorbed, a specific thematic representation is secondary to the suggestive effect that the paintings provoke. Working with fluid, unfiltered brushwork, Kay builds surfaces that not only capture the reality of nocturnal or twilight interior scenes but also shift them toward the ambiguous, uncanny, or ominous. By letting color and gesture guide the work beyond strict compositional planning, instinct takes over, shaping the extraordinary material dynamics. Oscillating between thin and thick paint layers, the shifts between matte, smooth finishes, and densely built-up strokes effectively play with luminosity, amplifying their tactile quality by absorbing the light in peaks and crevices. Throughout, the weave of raw, unprimed cotton canvas remains present as the first layer of the image and an essential source of light. Because of that, the surfaces often feel vibrant and alive, as if emotions are emerging through the texture, opening another access point for the viewer into a charged world.

 

Purposely going against the contemporary trend of bold, saturated colors, Kay favors muted tones alongside areas of saturation and pure color. This allows for greater complexity and nuance, while pointing towards a meeting point between reality and fantasy. Additionally, these contrasts contribute to an almost nightmarish atmosphere, where color itself intentionally balances latent brutality and vulnerability. The night-dark blacks, unclean whites, and artificially sweetened purples or oranges reinforce the dreamlike, uneasy quality of the scenes by constructing nuanced distinctions among colors. On the other hand, the broad range of grays helps create a sense of reality in the paintings, without necessarily falling into a realistic style. Guided by instinct and emotional resonance, this intuitive mix of colors occasionally culminates in a single object or element, both intensifying the atmosphere and light of the scene and underscoring the expressive approach to otherwise fairly strictly structured visuals. Kay explains this evocative quality of painting through an analogy of the enigma and the riddle: “The riddle is a way for painting to be playful and mysterious, where the viewer senses that there is a hidden answer behind the image. The enigma lies in the sensual and atavistic quality, which suggests that, even when confronted with a language or a form that resembles language, representation and legibility remain impossible. Much like the general feeling in life."

 

- Saša Bogojev