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MANIFESTO OF VISIONARY ART
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ERNST FUCHS: MOSES BEFORE THE BURNING BUSH
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Among the eldest of the Visionaries still alive and practising his art today is Ernst Fuchs."I have always been drawn towards things which man cannot see from the exterior," he has written."And I have always practiced a kind of art which depicts things that, otherwise, man only sees in his dreams or hallucinations. For me, the threshold has to be crossed from inner images to their expression in wakeful being - the transformation of dreams and fantasy into the world of reality and its plane of visual imagery." (6)
With dark penetrating eyes and a long flowing beard, Fuchs stands like a desert prophet to the wandering tribes of our times. He has crossed the Sinai of burning visions many times, and left there marks and signs for others to follow.
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A second generation of Visionaries has set out, following the trackless way through desert solitude. For Mati Klarwein, a visionary piece of art is like a journey into uncharted territory. This "no man's land is the area where no word has trodden yet, no symbol imposed its footprint upon the sands of the memory desert. No man's land is the distance from behind my eyes to eternity." (7)
Meanwhile, for Alex Grey, the journey has a purpose; there is a definite 'mission of art'. "In order to produce their finest works," he has written, "the artists lose themselves in the flow of creation from their inner world, becomes possessed by an art spirit. Every work of art embodies the vision of it's creator and simultaneously reveals a facet of the collective mind. Art history shows each successive wave of vision flowing through the world's artists. ...The history of art is a vast record of tens of thousands of artists and their acts of disciplined passion bringing vision to form."(8)
This sense of shared vision, this unaccountable feeling of kinship, is encountered by many solitary walkers on the desert path. Throughout history, from different lands and cultures, there has emerged 'the invisible tribe'(9), as one artist put it. Or, according to Fuchs, 'the secret lodge': "I entered ever more deeply into the realm of hermetic motifs... Its adherents were to be found only in the obscure groups of outsiders... Scattered through many countries, they were members, as I understood it, of a secret lodge: the Masonic Order of Visionaries." (10)
Though many such artists have appeared over the course of time, each bearing the marks of his epoch and cultural style, their works have also betrayed the traces of something hidden, something far more deeply incised: the timeless style of the archetypes; the primordial style that first manifest itself 'at the beginning'.
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