The black light is about the influence that different secret traditions have had on contemporary art since the fifties to the present. This exhibition brings together, more or less chronologically, 350 works (paintings, drawings, audiovisuals, sculptures, photographs, books, installations, music, prints and documents) by artists as different as Antoni Tàpies, Agnes Martin, Joseph Beuys, Henri Michaux , Ulla von Brandenburg, William S. Burroughs, Joan Jonas, Jordan Belson, Goshka Macuga, Kenneth Anger, Rudolf Steiner, Alejandro Jodorowsky, Francesco Clemente and Zush. The exhibition also explores the influence of esoteric ideas in areas of pop culture, such as comics, cinema, jazz and alternative rock.
The work of all the selected artists demonstrates the relevance and continuity of all these normally ignored currents, and in many cases art is understood as a possible way to a higher cognitive level, or as a form of knowledge in itself. These ideas are contrary, for example, to a purely formalistic understanding of abstraction.
The dominant influence of rationalist thoughts was one of the reasons why esoteric ideas, very important for the development of twentieth-century art, were ignored or belittled in our time. However, in recent years, many artists have returned to be interested in topics such as alchemy, secret societies, esoteric branches of the great religions, oriental philosophies, magic, psychedelia and the ingestion of drugs, symbols and the universal myths, the so-called fourth way of the Armenian mystic Georges Gurdjieff, etc., generating a renewed interest in these issues that did not exist since the Counterculture of the sixties and seventies. As the writer Enrique Juncosa, curator of the exhibition, says, this interest "may be due to the fact that we are living in a restless and dissatisfied world, worried about issues such as the new colonial wars, fundamentalist terrorism, the very serious ecological crisis or nationalist populisms, as in the sixties and seventies was feared an imminent nuclear devastating catastrophe. Also, a large part of the dominant art in our days is extremely boring to lack any mystery and deny the poetization and interpretation of their experience.
The title "The black light" refers to a concept of Sufism, the esoteric branch of Islam that shows a path of connection with the divine through inner vision and mystical experience. Sufism, which thinks that reality is light in different degrees of intensity, speaks of a whole system of interior visions of colors that mark the spiritual progress of the initiates until they become "men of light". The objective is to achieve a stage of supraconsciousness that is announced symbolically with this black light.
Add new comment