Children love make-believe, losing themselves easily in a world of their imagination.

But adults often lack that creativity and, instead, have to make an effort to make themselves believe. In his latest exhibition, Make It Believe, Amir Fallah gets in touch with the child within him by revisiting childhood memories and recapturing the joy of making up stories.

His colourful, surrealistic paintings present tiny vignettes from real and imaginary narratives, offering witty insights into human emotions, relationships, fears and aspirations.

Fallah uses a variety of materials to create his layered artworks. Besides acrylic, ink and watercolour, he also uses paper cut-outs, images scanned from books and magazines and even pieces from his own earlier paintings.

His tiered, seemingly chaotic compositions combine humour and spontaneity with deliberate structuring, cryptic symbols and philosophical undertones.

The artist uses bright gradient background washes to avoid any reference to the real world.

And his attention to detail can be seen in the flowers built from layers of paper, carefully painted patterns on paper cut-outs and subtle colour highlights on black-and-white photographs. In his earlier work, Fallah has used cacti to represent human beings in his paintings. The plants are a recurring element in this series too.

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