While traditional Surrealism focuses on Freudian principles of dream imagery infused with suppressed desires and repressed memories, the Surrealism of Dave Curtis is influenced more by Freud’s contemporary, Carl Jung. Curtis’ focus is on Ancestral Memories and the continuation of Archetypes that transcend the conscious memories of Homo Sapiens, and that will continue long after the reign of that self-destructive rogue species.

Cycles of history reassert themselves in a continuous rise, decline and fall in the history of both Man and Evolution, tempered by mass-extinction events. Curtis’ work goes far beyond the timeline of History imagined by Modern Science and Archaeology, instead reaching back into the “Deep Time” concept pioneered by Horror Author H.P. Lovecraft, in which the Elder Gods preceded the reign of the One God created by Man in His own image, revealing the brutal balance of Nature unhindered by that morality devised by Man.

Like Carl Jung, Curtis’ focus on symbols as expressions of Truth go far beyond the mere vocabulary and mathematics devised by Man’s attempt to understand the Divine. The beauty in this approach is that symbolic meaning is mutable, tempered by the viewer’s culture, ancestral memories and predispositions. A collection of symbols can take on different meanings, which Curtis believes are all relevant and that they can lead to an understanding of this world that we have all stumbled into.