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MANIFESTO OF VISIONARY ART
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MATI KLARWEIN: LANDSCAPE PERCEIVED (Detail)
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or denote. But, moving beyond that, our art and imagination may conjure up new worlds which words cannot describe - things beyond all verbal description. As we read, we are free to digress in our imagination, following chains of imagery and creating new combinations which eventually result in thoughts unheard of in the spoken language. As in dreams, we may begin to think in an image-language.
More fascinating still is the realization that we, while reading, must imagine the correspondence between the word and the world. We suppose it, we imagine it, and as we read, we picture it to ourselves - as if it were really there. But does such a connection actually exist?
While under the influence of hallucinagenic mushrooms, Terrence McKenna imagined that he could actually see this correspondence: "Things
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MATI KLARWEIN: LANDSCAPE DESCRIBED (Detail)
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such as the normally invisible syntactical web that holds both language and the world together can condense or change its ontological status and become visible," McKenna wrote.(94) In a similar way, while living on the island of Mallorca, Mati Klarwein "saw the entire coast, one sunny afternoon, composed of Hebrew texts," and for the probable reason that "I had ingested a wild dose... which altered my state of consciousness for a while." (95) He rendered this experience in two paintings: one of the landscape itself, which he titled Landscape Perceived, and the other of the same supposed landscaped, which now was only composed of spiralling Hebrew letters. The latter he called Landscape Described.
The images of this diptych invite us to ask: are words able to describe all that we perceive? Indeed, "Is language the adequate expression for all
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