Into the Night

A solo exhibition by Leonardo Sitoe

Long Gallery: 15.10.26 - 26.11.26

Into the Night examines my interest in dreams as a means of accessing personal and collective histories, while also considering how my waking experiences shape the worlds I encounter during sleep. Over time, I have become increasingly aware that my dreams are not always an unfiltered expression of the subconscious but are often influenced by my emotional and psychological states. For instance, I have noticed that periods of anxiety frequently coincide with more unsettling dreams and nightmares. This recurring experience has prompted me to consider how the conditions of my waking life extend into my dream states and how these experiences might be understood in relation to the broader atmosphere of uncertainty, anxiety and political tension that characterises the present moment.

My interest in dreams also extends to the myths, cautionary tales and cultural narratives that shaped my childhood. Stories we encounter while growing up do not necessarily remain confined to the past; they can resurface in unexpected forms, transforming into images, figures and situations that inhabit our dreams. I am interested in how these narratives persist, mutate, and acquire new meanings through the imagination, particularly when they return without a clear explanation or a fixed symbolic meaning.

The works presented in Into the Night emerge from dreams that have remained with me beyond the act of waking. I select these experiences according to the intensity of the emotions they produce or the extent to which their images continue to occupy my thoughts throughout the day or even the week. A dream does not necessarily become material for a work because I understand what it means; rather, its persistence, atmosphere or unresolved details create a need to return to it through drawing. The resulting works are therefore not intended as literal illustrations of dreams or definitive accounts of their meanings. They are attempts to hold onto particular moments within these dream states, translating their emotional intensity and visual strangeness into a material form.

Charcoal has become an especially suitable medium for this process. Its tactile qualities, powdery residue and capacity to shift between dense darkness and delicate tonal transitions allow me to work with the uncertainty and instability that characterise my dream experiences. The medium can produce figures and environments that appear momentarily recognisable before dissolving into a shadow, obscurity or ambiguity. Its susceptibility to smudging and erasure also allows the image to remain unsettled, as though it is still emerging or receding from memory. I find this physical relationship with charcoal particularly appropriate for narrating dreams, where images rarely remain fixed and where the atmosphere of an experience can be more enduring than its precise details.

The figures that emerge in my drawings resist identification and fall outside any fixed category. Their mythic character, together with their faceless or barely articulated faces, intentionally contributes to the ambiguity of the dream world. I deliberately withhold a name or origin for them; rather, I use the act of titling as a guide, a prompt that sets a narrative in motion in the viewer’s mind. The story that forms from there is the viewer’s own, built from their associations with furred, shadowed forms rather than supplied by me. Depending on what each viewer has accumulated, whether through folklore, childhood memory, or encounters with animals, these entities may read as creatures, guardians, or threats.