'In the Service of Dreams': Ian Mwesiga's exhibition at the Mariane Ibrahim Gallery in Paris

By MANUELA ANNAMARIA ACCINO July 16, 2025

The dream is the action of the imagination in sleep, says Plato, and this reflection proves profoundly fertile in the artistic context of Ian Mwesiga, a Ugandan painter whose gaze focuses on the investigation of the invisible dimensions of human existence. Starting from this idea of the dream as a creative and vibrant capacity, Mwesiga strives in his work to explore a universe where reality and fantasy intertwine, condition and dissolve in a continuous flow of images and stories.

Ian Mwesiga, Ascension, 2025, Oil on canvas, 65 x 39 3/8 in 165 x 100 cm. Photograph by Pauline Assathiany. Courtesy of the artist and Mariane Ibrahim

Mwesiga's art pushes beyond apparent solidities, imagining stories that carefully oscillate on the precarious axis between the real and the virtual, the past and the present, the conscious and the unconscious. His works are like windows opening onto a realm permeated with fragments of memory, which break down and reform, giving rise to shifting and plural perspectives. Memory, in this universe, is no longer a linear and stable reality, but breaks up and becomes tangled like a mosaic of memories and images that fall apart and reassemble, evoking the complexity of the human mind and the instability of memory. Each of Mwesiga's creations has the power to dissolve the boundaries of time and space, creating realms in which narratives overlap, brush against each other like a film in cinematic fog. The images, elusive and blurred, appear to the viewer like lucid dreams, revealing a world suspended between memory and fantasy, where the threads of narration are subtle and subject to continuous shifts. In this way, the work turns into a speculation on the way our mind faces and reconstructs the past and the imagined, in an eternal game of appearance and reality.

Ian Mwesiga, Canopy: Shadow with an umbrella, 2025, Oil on canvas, 59 x 51 1/8 in 150 x 130 cm. Photograph by Pauline Assathiany. Courtesy of the artist and Mariane Ibrahim

But this artistic research takes on further significance when placed in a broader context: that of the contemporary human being, who seems to have stopped dreaming. Modernity, with its speed, its media superficiality and its compulsive focus on data and performance, has often led the individual to lose contact with that dreaming dimension that, according to many traditions and philosophies, represents the true source of creativity, intuition and freedom. The rational and technological narrative in which we are immersed has reduced the dream to a distant memory, obscured by the incessant noise of a world that privileges the useful and the visible. 

Ian Mwesiga, Moon Walk II, 2025 Oil on canvas, 31 1/2 x 33 5/8 in 80 x 85.5 cm. Photograph by Pauline Assathiany. Courtesy of the artist and Mariane Ibrahim

Mwesiga, in this sense, is the spokesperson for an urgent and profound need: that of rediscovering the narrative power of the dream, capable of rekindling the human capacity to imagine beyond appearances and to recover that fragmented memory which, if reawakened, can restore meaning and depth to individual and collective experience. His works suggest that, even in an age of distraction and domination of the surface, the dream and imagination are still powerful tools of regeneration, discovery and resistance against cultural oblivion.

Ian Mwesiga, Morning shadow II, 2025 Oil on canvas, 11 3/4 x 9 7/8 in 30 x 25 cm. Photograph by Pauline Assathiany. Courtesy of the artist and Mariane Ibrahim 

Mwesiga's art takes the form of a lyrical and integral dream that unravels in the heart of contemporary man, spurring him to recognize and grasp the imprints of a universe that is as invisible as it is essential, made up of inner images, latent desires and infinite possibilities. His work, so dense, takes the form of a declaration of fidelity to the vitality inherent in the dream and the human capacity to continually reinvent oneself, in the awareness that, in the dream, resides one of the most powerful forms of freedom and creation.

Ian Mwesiga, View from the window, 2025 Oil on canvas, 29 1/2 x 23 5/8 in 75 x 60 cm. Photograph by Pauline Assathiany. Courtesy of the artist and Mariane Ibrahim.