The support is a pale canvas on which a room is laid out in fine graphite lines, a one-point perspective whose diagonals run from the corners toward a vanishing point hidden behind the figure. Over this architectural drawing a blue, translucent silhouette is projected: arms open, one hand enlarged as if pressed against the viewer's side of the surface. At its chest a small luminous rectangle shows a body lying on a bed, the sleeper the silhouette has left behind. The work joins two old languages: the Renaissance perspective box, built to place a body in measured space, and the shadow play, in which a figure is made only of light. The painting holds the room, the projection holds the soul, and neither quite contains the other.
Accounts of leaving the body during sleep belong to many traditions, from mystical literature to contemporary communities that exchange techniques online. The work sets that experience inside the most ordinary of settings: a bedroom drawn with a draughtsman's neutrality, the standard interior of any housing block. The projected figure is generic, without face or clothing, which makes the experience collective rather than personal. The glowing rectangle at its chest also recalls the light of a screen in a dark room, by which many people now fall asleep. Read this way, the image places two forms of disembodiment side by side: the spiritual one, sought deliberately through practice, and the technological one, in which attention quietly leaves the body every night.
The silhouette's gesture is ambivalent. The open arms suggest release, the lightness of a self no longer weighed down by flesh; the large hand pushed toward the surface reads instead as a request to stop, or as someone touching glass from the inside. Dissociation, in clinical language, describes a similar split: watching oneself from a distance, present and absent at once. The tiny sleeper framed in the chest holds the attention because it reverses the usual order, so that the body becomes an image carried by the mind, small and vulnerable. A viewer may recognise the floating moments just before sleep, or moments of shock in which one seems to observe one's own life from somewhere slightly above it.
Most of us know the dream of falling, or of floating just above the bed. Federico Clapis gives that half-waking sensation a literal image: a blue figure of light hovering in a pencil-drawn bedroom, its own sleeping body visible in a small window at its chest. The piece is a painting that moves, a hybrid that anticipates how much art is now seen on screens, looping and glowing, half object and half video. Its subject, astral projection, may sound esoteric, yet lucid dreaming, meditation apps and sleep tracking have turned the inner life of the night into a mainstream preoccupation. The image is simple enough to remember after one glance: a person stepping out of themselves, one hand raised toward us.
