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MANIFESTO OF VISIONARY ART
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MOREAU: THE CHIMERAS (Detail)
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stones, some being more like masses of transparent fruits.... All seemed to possess an interior light." (51)
Have not all of these visions, described here in words, also found pictorial form in the canvases of Bosch, Blake, Moreau, and Fuchs? In The Chimeras of Moreau, and his Triumph of Alexander the Great, have we not seen vast celestial cities rise up with Gothic, Indian, and Aztec architecture all intermixed? Fuchs himself describes how "In 1952, in an attic room near boulevard Montparnasse, I saw architectural visions for the first time. They passed across the wall, as if
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painted there in fresco, while I lay feverous in my bed... This architectural panorama became clearer and clearer, so that I could distinguish the finest details. Soon, it was as if I were flying with open arms over these unending panoramas, while their forms continued to metamorphose and transform, one after the other..."(52)
In Fuchs' Job and the Judgement of Paris, we behold not only this architectural complexity, but also 'the beauty of curved reflections, of sleek and smooth surfaces' just mentioned by Huxley. Bosch too delighted in polished stone and metal, and moreover, in their strange, hybrid forms, such as appears in his fountain from The Garden of Earthly Delights. Here mineralia, vegetalia, and animalia - their various textures and surfaces - are strangely displaced from one to the other. Plants seem made of stone, while architectural devices acquire an organic quality.
Giger has also commented on this strange displacement of textures and forms. Through spontaneous drawings with the airbrush, he "...established certain connections in the architecture of the human body on the one hand and in the technological world on the other. Through them, I also learned to value more highly the theories put forward by Ernst Fuchs in his Architectura Caelestis."(53)
Fuchs has commented at length how, after the ingestion of hashish, he marvelled at "mountains of shining gorgeous stones with a shimmering light on them. Everything was translucent and seemed to glow from within." (54) That same night, he began painting transparent, jewel-like tear drops over the surface of his Psalm 69. During this same period, he beheld a colossal figure in a dream composed of different stone surfaces - a colossal figure that, in another revelatory dream, appeared to him as an angel. Thus began his series
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