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MANIFESTO OF VISIONARY ART
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How difficult it is - to describe or depict this vision of oneness - and yet it underlies all that we are. It is that which lies beyond the bound of our vision - the supra-visionary, le sur-visuel. It is that which we seek to reveal through a new image-language.
Such a language may come about through on-going experimentation and the use of new technologies. And yet, the old forms, the symbols and archetypes used since time immemorial by ancient cultures and even by Christianity itself - these still possess great hidden powers. But, as heirs to the Christian tradition, we must learn to see through the symbols of Christianity to their underlying archetypes: archetypes Christianity shares with other sacred traditions, joining itself to them and participating in their sense of all-encompassing Unity.
As Grey notes in the Mission of Art: "New art forms emerge through visionary insight, technical innovations and when cultures collide. Today, the simultaneous impact of so many technological innovations and divergent world cultures is spawning a hybrid multicultural art."(39)
This multi-cultural vision of Unity has already manifest itself in the canvases of Klarwein, Fuchs, and Grey himself. Meanwhile, many of Johfra's marvellous paintings from the Zodiac series bring Christian symbols in combination with their ancient antecedants - Egyptian, Greek, and Babylonian - while pairing them simultaneously with a whole slew of Esoteric motifs: Alchemy, Tarot, and the Kabbala.
But, it is particularly his triptych of the Unio Mystica which offers a vision of the transcendent One underlying all cultural manifestations of the Sacred. Here, he has had recourse to, not only Christian and Hebrew mythologies, but Egyptian, Buddhist, Taoist, and even his own native Nordic
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JOHFRA: UNIO MYSTICA (Detail)
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mythology. Though viewed separately, like so many vignettes in stained glass, these different mythological figures also coalesce into one image. And, as is the case with stained-glass, they may then become transparent to the single Light shining behind them.
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