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It used to be called Magic. Now it’s called Photoshop. But to the untrained eye, the difference is hardly discernable.

One suspects 500 years ago while Michelangelo was hanging upside down painting the roof of the Sistine Chapel, it would have been almost inconceivable to imagine that computer programs would become the tool of the artist. But tool they have become by a younger generation who are exploring new limits and pushing the boundaries of their imagination.

Justin Peters is one such individual. He’s a 22-year-old German digital surrealist artist who merges reality with his own imagination using Photoshop.

He’s fond of quoting Picasso – “Everything you can imagine is real.” Which frankly is not too far from Alice in Wonderland’s “Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.” It appears that Peters imagines at least as many impossible things before breakfasts himself. His dreamscape imagination is presented to an audience with the skill of a photographer snapping images from the catalogue of his mind.

Peters paints this dream world, where everything is possible, through unexpected and startling combinations of imagery. Glowing moons act as lanterns or fill an outdoor fire pit. A beautiful underwater woman has no legs but instead the white viscous, ethereal tendrils of a jellyfish. The iris of an eye which is really the face of a clock, watching our lives tick slowly by.

His work is compassionate at times, whimsical at others. Work that makes you look twice or draws down on your memories or triggers an emotional response is what art is all about. And Peters captures this in spades.

The young German is motivated by the desire to open other people’s minds, to help them discover their own internal landscape of possibilities or impossibilities as the case may be. He hopes that the viewer perceives a new and different world, “… one which they can dive into, to prove that everything is possible when you open your mind.”

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