It has been exactly 100 years since 1924 when André Breton adopted the term “Surreal art” from the Manifeste du surréalisme. He defined Surrealism as psychic automatism, meaning that the unconscious mind is used to create art, which results in dreamlike and sometimes bizarre imagery that illustrates the minds deepest thoughts.

At the time these thoughts were informed by a disillusionment with modern society, when industrialisation and the First World War profoundly changed the way we live and experience relationships.

One hundred years later, Sulette van der Merwe’s exhibition titled Surreal synapse continues in the surrealist tradition but explores the effects that one of today’s prime change drivers, popular visual culture, has on our deepest thoughts. This has taken the artist’s practice towards cross translating between the disorientating hallucinatory qualities of internet images and the process of painting and mixed media sculptural installation.

With this exhibition Van der Merwe, who is a respected painter, will also present a video animation and a life-size installation piece, rendering a colourful world that is philosophical and personal while always remaining playful.

“Absurd biomorphic shapes, depicting transgressive boundaries between the body and graphics in my artworks are metaphors for responding to contemporary visual culture in 2024. The information pathways in my brain are succeeding in making real the objects of my imagination by allowing nonsensical connections to be given time to cross pollinate. I am reintroducing surrealist intuition to a digitised world. The artworks are a type of language system of the imagination. The artworks embrace a reflection of reality in which even the illogical is not unreasonable.”

Surreal synapse opens at the WORLDART gallery (54 Church Street, Cape Town cbd) on Thursday 4 April and will run till Friday 26 April.