In a world saturated with flashing images, why paint? Back in the 1960s, critic Clement Greenberg acknowledged that painting struggled to compete with the immediacy and sensory impact of film and television. Today, the playing field may appear exceedingly more skewed against visual arts, with the constant stream of social media posts that users scroll through at an average rate of 3 seconds per image.

In this era of mindless consumption, images that resist instant categorization and interpretation, stimulate the viewers’ imagination, and inspire creativity are vitally important. As a compulsive daydreamer and a student of different genres of painting including surrealism, Dastpak is fascinated by what he sees during daydreams, closed-eye visualizations, and hypnagogic phenomena. He is driven to share these experiences through his paintings. But, these visions are fleeting and fragile, disappearing as soon as he looks away. The imaginary cannot survive contact with reality, and he does not attempt to produce mimetic representations of his daydreams. Dastpak is more interested in creating pictorial arrangements that serve as a field of possibilities for the viewer’s own imagination and creativity.

Like most of his paintings, Traces (2022) and The Bath (2023) do not have premeditated structures or narratives; however, a pictorial drama unfolds in these paintings as the viewer begins to perceive vague causal connections between the disjointed vignettes and disparate characters that populate the canvas. In this context, the role of the viewer is not to interpret the paintings (they were made to evade “understanding”), but it is to allow their imagination to complete the unfolding narrative in their own unique ways. Dastpack’s crowded and colorful canvases are intended to be daydreaming kits that hopefully enable viewers to imagine new possibilities and create new worlds in their minds.