ORSOLYA BAJUSZ works at the boundaries of contemporary art, exploring the intersection of science communication and contemporary art. At Ozora, she is… making sense of visionary art.

Relating to art can happen on a level of personal, subjective experience (makes me feel something, and reminds me of something). Such experiences might have a commonality, for example,  a rose would remind many people of love but might remind others of gardening. Also, different cultures attach different meanings to different images.

But what if we assume some images are not made because someone wanted to convey an already existing meaning, idea, or feeling to someone else? That the image was before the meaning, the thing it could mean or refer to?

Visionary art is precisely the case. Visionary images are not postmodern: they are not made in a way a curator or a DJ remix and redistribute already existing signs and meanings. Instead, they are a window to other realities. If anything, they are channeled, not constructed (which means being made in a calculated and rational way). They are not metaphoric, they are themselves.

They are also not really religious images: there is no dogma or religious institution behind them. 

Also, a contemporary audience would not consume images in a religious context: nowadays we live in an image-saturated environment, where however exciting, no image would be able to have such an effect as before mass media and digital technologies. Also overall our relationship to images is not hierarchical and one-way, we are all consumers and producers, just as well as curators and DJs: we each remix and redistribute culture that existed before, and through cultural and media consumption co-construct our social world. Therefore a visionary image in a contemporary context could never equal a religious image in an archaic or feudal society. 

They are also social products. If visionary images are produced through traditional techniques, such as drawing or painting, then they will reference art history and the discourse of their own medium, in the sense that a painting is always about painting itself. Digital technologies (AI, 3D, or composite software such as Photoshop) are also social constructs, and when they use pixels (textures of backgrounds) they directly reference existing things. The new element, the wildcard which makes visionary images really exciting is their place of origin (hyperspace, astral planes), or their non-human originator (such as plant spirits, or mushrooms) and a truly visionary mode of relating to these images would be to take these originators seriously. Such art could help us imagine new relations, and new modes of relating to the world- recognizing the creativity of nature and the cosmos.