Galerie Alberta Pane, Paris Marcos Lutyens & Raimundas Malašauskas
Hypnotic Show (in Pictures) is a solo exhibition by Marcos Lutyens that offers a compact retrospective of 21 performances developed over the past sixteen years in collaboration with visionary curator Raimundas Malašauskas. These performances—staged in diverse venues around the world—explore states of induction, altered consciousness, and the fluid boundaries between audience and artwork.
This exhibition serves both as documentation and as a portal: a visual reactivation of past performances and a meditation on the malleable nature of perception. The following essay by Raimundas Malašauskas recounts the origins and evolution of the project—tracing its improbable beginnings, philosophical undercurrents, and the curious pathways it has taken across time, space, and consciousness.

In 2008 when I was living in San Francisco, gallerist Jessica Silverman extended a carte blanche invitation to me to curate a show at her newly opened space there. I proposed “an exhibition in the mind of the audience that happens only through hypnosis.”
There is a lot to unravel about that statement from today’s perspective, but to keep the matters focused on the subject of this publication, this is what I had in mind back then: the public, not the artist, would be hypnotized, so that the site of creative force is transferred from artist to the public as a fundamental condition of the project; we would need scripts that invoked artworks; and we would need someone who could actually hypnotize people.
In my initial attempts to procure what would become the hypnotist’s scripts, I sent a letter to several artists, asking: “Can you suggest an artwork that can function within the protocol of hypnosis?” The scripts would be the vehicles for the experience, and commissioning them was almost like commissioning a piece of software that generates chains of action. The letter elaborated: “The basic idea of the show is to radicalize the ‘hypnotic power’ of an artwork into pure hypnosis (i.e., to see the brain space as an ultimate medium for art and to transmit/instruct an artwork via hypnosis). For example, imagine an empty room: 10 people and a hypnotist. The hypnotist hypnotizes the 10 people to experience an exhibition there, or to experience something that was proposed by artists. So the work of art exists only in the brain of an audience. How does this sound for you? Would you have anything in this show?”
Shortly, with the premise of “an empty room,” I had a bunch of first scripts in my hands. Now a more serious challenge loomed on the horizon: I had to find a hypnotist. Thanks to artist Ronni Kim in Los Angeles, to whom I described my inquiry in a long car ride, I got the telephone number of LA-based Marcos Lutyens, someone she described as a “multiverse artist.” I sent him the following text message: “Hello, I am curating an exhibition where the audience is hypnotized and experiences the exhibition under hypnosis. Let me know if you would be interested to discuss a possible collaboration to make this exhibition happen.” Shortly after, I received a response, and this is where our adventure began.
A few years later I was writing the following passage about him: “Marcos is the Master of the Ceremonies of the Hypnotic Show. He is deeply immersed in neuroscience, cognitive biomachinery, artificial and animal intelligence, eco-dreams, self-educational complexes, bacterial visualisation techniques, and all kinds of indigenous knowledges of the world at large. He speaks several languages, cracks jokes that make people of different countries laugh at the same time and, among other things, practises post-Ericksonian hypnosis as a way to access what he calls the unconscious mind."
Marcos is convinced of the existence of forms that trespass the division between the conscious and unconscious mind. He relentlessly searches for them. He believes that people have been repressed by various systems—economics, beliefs, the morals and tastes of their social class—and as a result have become highly automated, desensitized, violence-prone individuals driven by greed, function, and reason. To access the unconscious mind means activating other ways of sensing and being, and this is where he inserts himself: at the interstices of the possible.
His transversal social connectivity is remarkable: once in Bordeaux, we induced several scenarios of the hypnotic experience suggested by artists there. That same night, Marcos was on a Skype conference hypnotizing nine Raelian bishops in Las Vegas. His aim was to encourage them to draw visual schema that they saw in their minds, which were then extruded into sculptures and installations that visitors could walk within and around. Recently, he also worked with a group of third-gender people known as the Muxe, part of the Zapotec cultures of Southern Mexico. Through a process of hypnosis, thought-forms relating to archetypes of family, home, and surroundings were translated into large-scale firework sculptures and set off at the culmination of an involved procession through the streets of Oaxaca. Besides physical and mental fireworks, Marcos builds architecture and immersive environments at the convergence of time, mind, body, and narrative.
We couldn’t meet each other that time in LA. He arrived in San Francisco the same day that the Hypnotic Show premiered at Jessica Silverman Gallery: 16 March, 2008. We met over lunch in the Mission District and I remember being slightly anxious on my way over to see him, knowing that I was making the acquaintance of a man with whom, in a few hours, I would ask people to give up control to and immerse into a group exhibition in trance. I realized quickly that my new accomplice was more than a nice person and I felt confident that at the very least we would be able to make people laugh or talk about some unobtrusive techno-gnostic matter. His presence remains a warranty that makes people feel comfortable; they develop an instant trust in what’s going on. And yet Marcos has remained opaque to the social standards of the contemporary art world; he is an alien with a soothing and reassuring voice. It changes when you listen to it carefully, and this is what he asks you to do: listen carefully to the tone of his voice, surf its rhythm. Even as you sense your reluctance to surrender to the vocal authority, you don’t want to stop listening to it. Multiple cascades of perception follow, projections overlap, narratives diffuse.
That afternoon, we prepared a sequence of scripts with which to induce the public. We went through each of them and Marcos made a drawing that would later serve as a score for what he calls the guided daydreaming session.
More than a decade later these scores are being exhibited in his solo exhibition in Paris. They display his passion for a complex world-making through images and scenes, a movement from one thing to another in a caring and gentle way, rich in color and vertiginous edges.
Walking towards Jessica Silverman Gallery on that rainy evening, we didn’t know what the night would be like. There had been no rehearsal or “hypno-check.” The passing cars on the wet asphalt were splashing more sound than usual—perhaps we were already affected by what we were about to do in an hour: amplify sensorial awareness.
There were many things we had no sense about that night. For instance, neither Marcos nor Yi-Ping, his partner, knew that the project would continue on, that both of them, along with their son Jasper, would be spending the entire summer of 2012 at dOCUMENTA (13) in Kassel, Germany, where Marcos would perform 340 sessions of the Hypnotic Show in his dualist Reflection House in Karlsaue Park, a place where illusion and the real sank into each other. I didn’t know that some of my friends would keep sending the same apologetic note over the next couple of years whenever the Hypnotic Show was presented; it took a while for people to accept the fact that there is no opening reception and no show in the gallery. We didn’t know yet that by gathering people through the expectation of hypnosis, we would end up producing a social situation of conscious and engaged conversation. We also didn’t know that some other day four writers would be writing scripts based on historic exhibitions for a series of hypnotic sessions at Artissima in Turin, under Francesco Manacorda’s direction.
“Imagine,” Marcos said after asking people to relax and close their eyes, “there is a magnet in your hands. You don’t have to understand what I am saying, just follow my voice.”
Dreaming and drifting, dreaming and drifting, he keeps moving you along the path of words. Words are heavy, translucent, rounded. You sink in lucid somnolence where supposed oppositions are not excluding each other. Sharp is opaque, fast is slow, distant is close. Justice is everywhere, truth is never old, life is never short of hope. A new imagination of our world is clear and doable. These scores are maps of movement through this world.—Raimundas Malašauskas, 2024