Art & Culture

In ‘The Raw and the Cooked,’ Thomas Dillon Explores Painting in a Time of Unraveling

BYLeila Khatib

December 11, 2025

In his first exhibition in the Middle East, The Raw and the Cooked, Thomas Dillon arrives in Dubai with a proposition that feels almost countercultural: emotion as material, instinct as method, and the human hand as the final frontier in an age increasingly mediated by machines. “That is how broader reality feels at the moment,” Dillon tells MILLE. “My process is uncovered through the unconscious, the divine, or the spirit.”

At Opera Gallery, the British artist’s solo exhibition, which got underway from October 23 to November 17, unfolds like a study in tension. His works don’t seek representation or narrative; they operate closer to sensation, hovering in that charged space where something struggles to hold itself together even as it begins to fall apart.

Dog Star, 2025, Acrylic, ink and dye on canvas, 86 x 120 in | 218.4 x 304.8 cm. Supplied

Before painting, Dillon moved through music production and writing, disciplines governed by rhythm, pacing, and structure. Painting, for him, is where those structures break. The canvas becomes a place where time doesn’t progress so much as fold in on itself. This collapse underpins the exhibition’s title, borrowed from Lévi-Strauss, whose study of how raw material becomes “cooked” through culture mirrors Dillon’s own transformation of instinct, memory, and emotion into visual form. “I’m taking raw experience and translating it into something that can be re-read,” he says. “Something that carries its own myth.”

Despite his fluency with early AI tools in sound and image, Dillon remains clear about their limits. “AI can create the simulation of a painting,” he notes, “but it can’t paint like a human.” His experiments with the technology sit at the edge of curiosity rather than craft, serving as an inquiry into its glitches, its failures, and its inability to replicate the tremor of a hand or the hesitation between two brushstrokes.

Fried, 2025, Acrylic, ink and dye on canvas, 60 x 48 in | 152.4 x 121.9 cm. Supplied

The result is work that feels as though pulled from a collective subconscious sharpened by the anxieties of the present. In Dubai, that tension found its audience. “My paintings are made for humans,” he reflects, “for that shared emotional core that cuts across place and identity.”

Perhaps that’s what stays with you after leaving the gallery. Not the theory or the myth, but the insistence that raw, unrefined, and unautomated emotion remains the one medium no machine can perfect.

In ‘The Raw and the Cooked,’ Thomas Dillon Explores Painting in a Time of Unraveling

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In ‘The Raw and the Cooked,’ Thomas Dillon Explores Painting in a Time of Unraveling

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