An oneironaut, in the vocabulary that gives Miloš Ilić’s painting its title, is someone who travels deliberately through dreams — awake enough inside the dream to notice its logic instead of just living it. Oneironautics, the largest and most ambitious canvas the Serbian surrealist has painted, doesn’t illustrate that idea so much as become an instrument for it: a 150 × 150 cm field where hands multiply, interlock, and dissolve into one another until the painting itself starts to behave like the dream it’s named for.
Hands are Ilić’s signature vocabulary, and they appear across nearly all of his surrealist work — but nowhere as insistently as here. Trained at the Faculty of Applied Arts in Belgrade, where he completed both his undergraduate and graduate studies in painting, Ilić has described his ambition plainly: to build a surreal world made entirely of countless hands, endlessly connecting and expanding into one another. In smaller, more intimate pieces — a face cradled in a palm, two figures reaching toward each other — a single pair of hands carries the emotional weight of the scene. In Oneironautics, that weight is distributed across dozens of them, and the effect changes entirely.
Look for a single body to anchor the composition and there isn’t one. No torso, no face, no figure the hands could be said to belong to — just wrists emerging from other wrists, fingers closing around forearms that turn into more fingers, a chain of grasping that never resolves into an owner. Whether these hands are reaching for each other, holding on, or pulling apart stays deliberately unresolved. The same gesture that reads as tenderness in one passage reads as entrapment two inches away, and Ilić never tips the reading toward either one.
Scale matters here in a way it doesn’t in Ilić’s smaller paper works, several of which — Obsession, Loneliness — were shown in the “Paper Chase” group exhibitions. Those pieces work at the size of a private object, something held close. Oneironautics, oil on canvas and considerably larger, asks to be stood in front of rather than held, and the multiplying hands stop feeling like a detail and start feeling like a landscape — less a picture of hands than a picture of what it’s like to be inside a mind that won’t stop connecting one thought to the next.
Oneironautics, along with the rest of Miloš Ilić’s work, is on display on his artist profile and on the piece’s own page on Art Fair.
