The series "The dreamer slept but did not dream" (2024) consists of a set of visual fragments, reflections on the nature of vision itself. The sensitivity of the owl's visual apparatus is replicated by the quality of the retro-reflective support, activated by the movements of the viewer or by changes in lighting. The image presents a literary topos, that of entering the nocturnal forest, torch in hand, in search. Surrounding the viewer is a set of fairy-tale animals, symbolic but also real, part of the artist's personal archive.

The series evokes the ambiguity of a threshold condition, a hypnagogic state, the paradox inherent in the inability to distinguish night from day, dream and wakefulness: the owl, a nocturnal animal, benevolent as well as malevolent in folklore, awake while people dream: an almost hallucinatory vision for the observer who enters the interstice of the threshold. The atmosphere suggested is the sleepless, foggy and surreal one that permeates Vargtimmen (1968) by Ingmar Bergman, in which the protagonist is immersed, unable to distinguish dream from reality. The three small icons outline a sort of perceptive rhythm, a visual intensity that grows in the three images and ends in a silent and dreamless sleep.

Luca Campestri (Florence, 1999) is an Italo-German artist based in Bologna, Italy, where he attended courses in Decoration - Art and Environment as well as Visual Arts at the Academy of Fine Arts.
His research spans various mediums, namely video, photographic and sound installations, with a central focus on the concept of the specter as a partial being: an entity that no longer exists or is yet to exist, but whose effects persist or precede their enactment. Consequently, Campestri's works are often configured as the imprint left by a memory that is fading and stage affective places and dynamics of both mnemonic and image disintegration.