On display at Opera Gallery Dubai, The Raw and the Cooked marks notable American artist Thomas Dillon’s first solo exhibition in the Middle East and a significant new chapter in his international career. One is welcome to admire his expressive paintings until 17 November 2025.
The title of the exhibition references anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss’s seminal study of myth, in which he contrasts the “raw” with the “cooked” as symbols of nature and culture. Dillon borrows this duality to frame the tensions that animate his own work: instinct and intellect, gesture and structure, chaos and form. His paintings can be read as a visual negotiation between these opposing forces, testing how far painting can stretch as a bridge between the primal and the deliberate. The raw passages of paint, left unrefined and gestural, coexist with “cooked” areas of crystalline order, so that the canvas becomes a stage where these energies continuously collide and evolve.
About the artist
Thomas Dillon (b. 1986, Staten Island, New York, USA) is a Philadelphia-based self-taught artist whose approach to painting is rooted in intuition, ritual, and the physicality of gesture: a process that seeks to bypass conscious control and instead channel what he calls “bodily intelligence.” Before turning to painting, Dillon was active in music and writing. These disciplines continue to shape his sense of rhythm, structure, and improvisation on canvas.
In his studio, Dillon works with unconventional tools, such as sticks, syringes, chopsticks, and squeegees, and uses acrylics, inks, and dyes to build up large-scale, dynamic surfaces. They seem to oscillate between chaos and order. Figures, eyes, and torsos sometimes emerge from the abstraction as though summoned by the movement of the paint itself. Each art piece begins with a personal ritual that involves breathwork, incense, or mantra, setting a meditative tone that guides the process from raw instinct to considered form.
Dillon’s paintings resist polish and finality; they feel alive, unresolved, and in motion. Through his intuitive process, the artist restores painting to a deeply human scale, one that privileges materiality, touch, and time over digital perfection. The Raw and the Cooked thus becomes a meditation on painting itself: as an act of surrender, a form of myth-making, and a living dialogue between the elemental and the constructed.
To get more information about The Raw and the Cooked, please visit the official web page of the exhibition.
In addition, you might be interested in exploring The Only Way Out Is Through: The Twentieth Line.
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