- Hidde van Schie’s book Pataphor presents a surreal, fluid, and conceptually expansive collection of drawings that exist in the richly imaginative and speculative space implied by the term 'pataphor'. A development from Alfred Jarry’s concept of ‘pataphysics (the science of imaginary solutions), the pataphor extends metaphor to its furthest, often absurd or hyperreal implications—where metaphor no longer simply represents reality, but creates a parallel world with its own logic. Van Schie’s drawings - often uncanny, hybrid, humorous, and dreamlike - mirror this ethos. They serve as visual extensions of linguistic detachment, unraveling the material world into an autonomous zone where the ordinary collapses under the weight of exuberant imagination. The works are populated by transformed organs, surreal landscapes, implausible objects, and recursive images, all rendered with a mix of naïve charm and deliberate grotesquerie. Think: bald mountains of liver, rustling forests of lung, sweet hillocks of muscle. His drawings are both hallucinatory and intimate, strange yet viscerally familiar. The introduction frames the book as an amphibious vehicle - one that floats and flies away from the ground of literal meaning into the ethereal, liberated terrain of poetic excess. In this space, the works do not follow fixed symbolic systems or cultural codes; instead, they generate meaning from their own internal rhythm and intuitive logic.