Somewhere out there, the horizon isn't an illusion — it is home to strange creatures who live right on it. Somewhere out there, everyone is pink, and their thoughts can turn into enormous orange bubbles. Somewhere out there, there is a whole other universe — and the man behind it is a young artist living in Algeria.

So, who builds a world like this? Ladies and gentlemen, meet Abdurrahman Salah — or, as you may know him better online, Lokher.

The interesting part is that almost nothing about the route here was obvious. Painting walls came before galleries, choosing fine art came almost by accident, and something that initially made art school considerably harder — being colour-blind — would eventually become one of the defining forces behind his visual language.

So, how do you go from there to building an entire universe people now recognise as yours? That is where our conversation with Lokher begins.

— Your real name is Abdurrahman Salah, so where did the name Lokher come from?

— It actually started as a joke. After my baccalaureate, I wanted to go to art school, and while I was preparing for the entrance exam, I was spending a lot of time with friends who were graffiti artists. One of them decided my art-school preparations had one rather serious omission: I still didn't have an artist name. There was just one problem: I couldn't think of one.

A little context before we get to the good part. In our Algerian dialect, lokher is basically the word you reach for when the actual word has temporarily left your brain. You know that moment when you are halfway through a sentence, forget what something is called and throw in a placeholder while you try to remember? That is “lokher”.

Then one day, my friend asked if I had finally settled on a name. I hadn't. “I don't know, maybe… lokher,” I said, using the word almost as a placeholder while I tried to think of something better. He stopped me there: “Wait — Lokher? That is actually good.” And just like that, the placeholder became the name.

We laughed about it, but the joke stuck — and so did the idea behind it. Lokher could be anyone; the name mattered less than the work.

I put Lokher on Instagram that same day — to an audience of maybe 200 people — and somehow it never left. I took it with me into art school, then into my professional practice, and by the time changing it became an option, I no longer wanted to.

Partly, I just liked the way it sounded. But I also liked the freedom behind it: Lokher doesn't point too strongly to one person; it could be anyone, or no one in particular. And I think that suits the way I want people to encounter my work: the painting comes first, and whoever made it can wait.

— Before painting came walls. How did street art become your first way into making art?

— A lot of my friends were graffiti artists, so street art was simply the world I found myself around. And when you are young, it feels brilliantly straightforward: you don't need a studio or much money. You get some paint, pull an idea from your sketchbook and find a wall.

That immediacy was what got me. You would finish a mural and then came the slightly nerve-racking part — waiting for people to notice it. Would they like it? Would they understand it? Would they stop at all? Suddenly, something that had been sitting privately in your sketchbook was out there, having a life of its own.

But for all the walls I painted — and all the sketchbooks I was filling in between — I still saw it as something I simply loved doing. Becoming a painter wasn't really part of the plan. In fact, it took art school for me to realise that what I had been doing all along was, quite literally, painting.

— Do you still make street art or graffiti now?

— Not anymore. Though I should make one small distinction: what I was doing wasn't quite graffiti. I was much more interested in figurative street art — taking the human figures I was constantly drawing and putting them onto walls.

The tricky part was finding the walls. In Algeria, we didn't really have legal spaces where you could simply turn up with your paint and get on with it, so abandoned buildings became our unofficial studios. We would find somewhere quiet, settle in and work.

Of course, it wasn't technically allowed, but those abandoned spaces gave us a little room to breathe. Even when the police came across us, they would often see that we were simply painting and let us carry on.

— So how did painting finally become the obvious choice at art school?

— “Obvious” might be generous. I basically arrived at painting by eliminating everything else.

In our second year of art school, we had four specialisms to rank, and I didn't have a great this is it moment with any of them. So I worked backwards: forget what I wanted — what did I definitely not want?

Space design went first. Everything was so clean and precise, down to the millimetre. I knew fairly quickly that wasn't me. Graphic design followed. My brother is a graphic designer, so I had already seen the hours spent in front of a computer. I need to move when I work, so that was another no.

Sculpture and modelling were next to go. I liked the physicality of them, but they came with their own practical problem: heavy materials and the need for a proper workspace. It wasn't exactly something you could pick up and work on anywhere.

By the end of the elimination process, painting was the one that remained. The irony, of course, is that I had been painting for years without calling it painting. I had been taking ideas from my sketchbook, putting paint on walls and thinking of the whole thing as drawing. Art school simply gave a name to what I was already doing — and once that clicked, I wanted to understand the medium properly, from the technical side to everything it could do aesthetically.

— Your work is often described as surrealist. But what does the process of building one of these paintings actually look like?

— For a long time, I assumed the process was mostly intuitive. But I draw obsessively — sometimes three or four times a day — and over the years, my sketchbooks have become something of an archive of possible paintings. (I work through ideas and references there first, building up far more compositions than will ever make it onto canvas. The ones that stay with me are the ones I return to and develop further.)

Drawing at that pace trained my eye. I started noticing which shapes and forms interested me, which didn't, and how seemingly unrelated elements could sit together. Even the little frames you see throughout my sketchbooks are part of the process: I draw the subject first, then frame it to see how the composition might eventually translate onto canvas.

Somewhere along the way, I realised I had accidentally built my own algorithm — a system for choosing references, arranging elements and knowing what was worth taking further.

But the real turning point came when I stopped treating each painting as a story that had to be invented from scratch. There are only so many times you can sit in front of a canvas and ask, Right, what happens in this one?

So I stopped building stories and started building a universe.

And suddenly, there was much more to discover. Instead of inventing a new world with every painting, I had one world that could keep expanding — with its own places, figures, stories and, as it turned out, some rather specific rules. My job became less about deciding what should happen and more about finding out what was already happening there.

— Take me inside this universe. What does it look like — and what rules does it live by?

— Some of the rules are surprisingly simple. People are pink, for one. Don't ask me why — that is just how humans come in this universe. There is no main character either. The figures change from painting to painting; this world is far too big to belong to just one of them.

Then there is the orange sphere: it appears when someone slips out of the present moment. You know when you are staring at something, perfectly awake, but mentally somewhere else? In my universe, you can actually see that happening: the sphere forms around the person's head.

The interesting part is what happens when they realise they are in that state. The sphere can then move outside the head and exist beside them — and suddenly, the emotion they are experiencing can take physical form.

— So how far does this universe go? Are you still discovering new parts of it yourself?

— Absolutely. In fact, I have just discovered a new place within it, and that is what I am exploring in the paintings for my solo exhibition in December.

Think about the horizon in real life: you look out at the sea and see that line where the water seems to meet the sky, but however far you move towards it, it keeps moving away. In my universe, that place actually exists.

The water physically meets the sky, almost at a 90-degree angle, and people live there. For them, the horizon isn't an illusion or some distant line — it is home. For everyone else, it remains unreachable. If you weren't born there, however far you travel towards it, it will keep escaping you.

And I deliberately say I have discovered this place rather than invented it. I don't really see myself as someone sitting outside this universe and deciding everything that happens inside it. I am more like someone who has access to it: I go in, find something I didn't know was there and bring it back with me.

That is how I think about the paintings too — almost as evidence. It is like coming back and saying, “Guys, I found something. I saw this. What is it? Let's talk about it.” I don't necessarily know the answer myself.

And technically, I am not the only one who can get in. There is an entrance available to all of us: sleep. You can reach this universe through dreams — and if you become lucid, you can even become conscious of being there.

— When I was looking through your Instagram, I came across a post where you wrote about how draining making art can become. What was happening at that point?

— I was preparing for my solo exhibition, and for the first few months, excitement did most of the heavy lifting. I had all these ideas I wanted to bring together and finally show people. But somewhere along the way, the practical side of being an artist began to catch up with me.

I had essentially disappeared into the studio for months, working on something nobody had seen yet, while all the usual questions were piling up in the background: How do I make money while doing this? How long can I keep going like this? And what happens if, after all that work, the exhibition simply doesn't land?

Naturally, my brain chose the final stretch to demand answers. With maybe 20 days or a month until the opening, paintings still unfinished and framing still to sort, I suddenly couldn't draw. I was overthinking everything to the point where my head and my hand seemed to have stopped speaking to each other.

That is what I wrote about in the post. And I am glad I did, because other artists started reaching out to say they had been through exactly the same thing. Some were people whose work I really admired, which was oddly reassuring. You look at great artists and assume they have somehow cracked the code. Then one of them says, No, this happens to me too, and you think, Right. Fine. Carry on.

So I did. And when the exhibition opened, the perspective shifted almost overnight. People connected with the work, and around 30% of it was sold within the first three days. After all that uncertainty, I suddenly had something very tangible telling me: Okay, perhaps this wasn't such a terrible idea after all.

I came out of it with a completely different energy — basically, Right, next December we do it again, only better.

— And that was your first solo exhibition. How did it actually come about?

— Yes — although I wasn't exactly the one who decided it was time. I had just got married, and my wife and I were spending our first year together in a very small house. I didn't have a studio then, so I was already working with whatever space I could find.

Some friends of mine had a studio with an exhibition space, and one day they asked me to come over for a chat. It felt oddly formal considering I had seen them only the week before, so I arrived with absolutely no idea what they wanted from me.

It turned out they had already made a decision: the next exhibition in the space would be mine. My first reaction was that I wasn't ready. Their response, essentially, was that readiness wasn't really up for discussion. Take the pressure off and go to work.

So I went home and did exactly that. I had one small wall where I worked and kept my paints, and as the months went on, the paintings slowly took over the whole house. By the end, our tiny home had become a rather accidental gallery.

That exhibition became my first real chance to see whether the universe I had been developing could exist beyond my own head. I didn't introduce it with a huge explanation or try to map out every rule — I was still discovering those myself. I simply gave people one way into it: when the figures enter that dream-like state, they gain access to another world, and some can become conscious while they are there.

That small piece of information turned out to be enough.

People started standing in front of the works and constructing stories I had never written. They connected different details, imagined what might be happening and filled the gaps with references of their own — films, games, stories, all the things we absorb without really thinking about it.

And that was probably my favourite discovery from the exhibition. I could create the world without controlling every story that happened inside it. Give people enough to find the door, and they will work out where they want to go from there.

— You are colour-blind, yet colour is such a big part of your work. How does that actually work?

— I already knew I was colour-blind before art school — two of my brothers are too. But once I started studying art, I had to figure out what that actually meant for the way I worked.

At art school, reproduction exercises made the difference impossible to ignore. We would all be working from the same painting by a master, but when the teacher reached mine, the colours were never quite where they were supposed to be. I could explain why, of course, but that didn't make my version any closer to what everyone else was seeing.

Eventually, one teacher simply stopped asking me to approach the exercise in the same way as the rest of the class. He couldn't judge my use of colour against theirs when I wasn't seeing the same thing in the first place — so he gave me the freedom to find my own way through it.

And that became the real shift for me. Rather than trying to match colours I couldn't always perceive in the same way, I started learning how they work. I went deep into colour theory — contrast, composition, the way one shade changes beside another — until it became almost a second language. If my eyes gave me one version of colour, theory gave me another way to understand it.

From there, I started developing my own little rules for working with colour. Take orange and green: they can't sit next to each other on my palette because, to me, the orange can start turning green. So they get some distance from each other — quite literally. Some colours even get their own white cups, because once too many shades are competing on the same palette, they start influencing what I see. Against white, everything becomes much easier to read.

The black lines grew into that system too, although they weren't purely practical. I love drawing — probably more than painting — and I never wanted it to stop at the sketchbook. Bringing those lines onto the canvas meant I could keep drawing right through the painting.

And conveniently, they help my eyes as well. Sometimes every colour is exactly where I want it, but I still can't quite separate one area from another. Then the black lines go in and everything clicks back into place: the contrast sharpens, the forms separate, and suddenly I can see the whole composition again.

— Which painting feels the most personal to you?

— Usually, the most recent one. Not necessarily because of the story inside it, but because of the experience I had making it.

The last painting I posted on Instagram is a good example. It is around 2.5 by 1.5 metres — one of the biggest pieces I had made — and it is now hanging in a home in Dubai. But for all that scale, it was the final 20 minutes that nearly defeated me.

The painting was essentially finished. All I had left was the line work, but every time I tried to put the brush to the canvas, it felt impossibly heavy. I knew exactly what I needed to do; I just couldn't make myself do it. I became so worried about one wrong move ruining the piece that eventually I started crying.

And there wasn't even a neat reason for it. I wasn't sad, exactly. I think I had simply reached the point of complete exhaustion, where your body reacts before your brain has had a chance to explain what is going on. I tried the obvious escape route: laptop open, series on, brain off. No luck. Eventually, I went to sleep, came back to the studio the next day, looked at the painting — and started crying all over again.

So I left it alone.

The following morning, something had shifted. I walked in, picked up the brush and finished the whole thing in about 20 minutes. At that point, I could only laugh: I had spent an entire day crying over 20 minutes of painting.