Smash through the walls of your imagination and discover a new reality with Johnny Romeo’s playfully surreal work, Peep Hole. In the painting, a seemingly ordinary household cat drenched in nocturnal hues pushes through the fabric of the canvas with the unlikely strength of the Incredible Hulk. Peep Hole ruptures the line between the dreamworld and everyday life, as Romeo’s intrepid feline impressively breaks through the fourth wall, staring out into the audience through its peep hole and calmly observing the world beyond the pictorial plane. Playing off the classic comic book imagery of his childhood, Romeo hilariously flips the colossal brute strength of the Incredible Hulk smashing through walls on its head by absurdly replacing him with a delicate, gentle cat who has shattered boundaries not through aggressive force but quiet determination. The symbol of the cat, empowered in its dreamlike state to achieve the impossible, acts as a powerful metaphor for overcoming obstacles, breaking past mental and personal blocks, and ultimately achieving enlightenment on your own terms. Having awakened its new powers, Romeo’s reality-bending feline adventurer is no longer content with just sitting still and ‘Staying Alive’ but is actively trying to ‘Strive Alive’ towards a better, more transcendent state of being. An avid fan of music, Romeo gleefully uses the word assemblage ‘Stay Alive’ as a nod to the disco boogie of the film ‘Staying Alive’ (1983), the sequel to ‘Saturday Night Fever’ starring John Travolta. Romeo continues to thread musical references through the title Peep Hole, an allusion to The Style Council’s ‘Confessions of a Pop Group 1, 2 & 3’. Within the context of the painting, the cat takes on the role of The Style Council’s ‘peeping Tom’ as it watches life take its clothes off through its surreal peep hole, beyond the reach of reality.