Untitled (Matt Mullican Under Hypnosis: Zurich)

From the seventies onwards, performances under hypnosis have been a key part of the work of Matt Mullican. The process to which the artist is subjected during these sessions functions as a catalyst for the creation of pictures, which in turn arise from the analysis or experimentation of an iconographic universe projected and interpreted through pictograms, cosmogonies, architecture or fictional characters who function as the artist’s "alter ego". Through hypnosis, Mullican places himself in a position of otherness; he becomes That Person, a preliminary figure who, either through the simple banality of everyday objects and actions or through the aggressiveness of schizoid behaviour, allows him to "enter the image", as he himself has said on numerous occasions. This transformation is presented not only as an entry into the field of irrationality, but also as a process of suggestion, a state between sleep and wakefulness, hallucination and consciousness, between fiction and reality. This is a method that he has incorporated throughout the years into the rest of his work, as a way of conceiving the relationship between the objective, the subjective and their representation. In this way, performance and language come together in Mullican’s work to unravel that which lies beyond the image.

Lola Hinojosa