Psychedelic Abstraction and the Sublime

In 2014, the critic Walter Robinson complained about abstraction as “zombie formalism” produced by art school soul-suckers and promoted by shameless flippers. But he was navel-gazing into a personal abyss of cynical capitalism, so myopically absorbed in his parochial and undead New York art bubble that the already thriving psychedelic art scene was completely invisible to him. If this glib dementor had been able to turn his head from the ludicrous self-centeredness of his city’s incestuous art, he would have seen that although he was correct that flipper abstraction was a walking corpse, elsewhere, far from the faux pretense of imitation, far from the crust and age of brown and yellow art hoarded like the relics of mummified saints in the carefully conservative museums of “Modern” Art (those cold institutional temples to the frostbitten and frozen 20^th century avant-garde – certainly the birthplace of zombies), abstract artists had abandoned convention and embraced the endless possibilities of transcendence.

Yes, psychedelic and visionary paintings of the past two decades are doubtlessly the most interesting and exciting works of 21^st century art. While repetition and pastiche clog North-Eastern galleries with dull tedium, international artists like American Oliver Vernon, Singaporean Ruben Pang, Irishman Paul Kerr, and Californian Mario Martinez (Mars-1) are expanding the boundaries of abstraction while ignoring the political directives and didactic elitism of the incestuous and institutionalized New York centered art scene, instead cheerfully indulging in a vibrant and global popular culture with a deep interest in the visual effects of hallucinations and imaging visions of planes of perception beyond the ordinary limits of seeing.

Mars-1, Ultra Terrestrial, 2023, Acrylic on wood panel, 24” x 24”

Some of the artists, like Vernon and Martinez, are deeply inspired by visions provided by DMT, magic mushrooms and LSD. Where inebriation is concerned, many American states are presently experimenting with relaxing legislation and expanding individual freedom of choice, and the renewed popularity of such medicines has inevitably impacted the aesthetics of a new psychedelic generation’s preferred art, and three-dimensional effects, bright colors, and motion have brought a spectacular new energy to abstract art. Vodka martinis are not the drug of choice of this generation’s artists.

Oliver Vernon, Billow, Acrylic on canvas, 72" tondo

Other artists, like Pang and Kerr, find their abstract paths to different planes of perception through metaphysics, not medicines, Kerr in his experiences as a conduit to the spirit of place in his beloved Irish countryside, Pang in his witness to the intense channeling of ghosts seen and communicated with by his Daoist sifu father. Pang and Kerr have their antecedents, too, in the chaos and wonder of 19^th century automatic drawings by medium Madge Gill, who spoke to spirits and unknowingly set a precedent for loose abstraction long before it appeared on the cautious walls of the mainstream establishment’s galleries, and secretive Hilma af Klint, who sprung into recent fame for her enormous paintings inspired by the guidance of angelic beings on other planes, and Joseph Stella, whose fantastic floral visions of light and land are filled with a joy and love and celebration absent from the bleak darkness of his celebrated cityscapes.

Paul Kerr, The Lamb in an Unravelling World, oil on linen, 110cm x 110cm

Unlike deadly bobo art, psychedelic abstraction is a true expression of authentic artistic bohemia, which is always the home of artistic innovation. Innovation never comes to art endorsed by agents of the establishment, which can only ever be conformist. A joyful celebration of creativity and skill, the work of these extraordinary and bohemian painters has travelled on a long, strange trip of evolutionary self-discovery since the rebellious sixties. Its creators are free from endorsing the bureaucratic political establishment, free to think about issues concerning creativity rather than concerning themselves with tedious didactic indoctrination, free to find their natural marketplace. As well as being honestly inspired as artistic expressions, these spectacular paintings are intellectually attractive because they successfully extend the narrative of abstraction while embracing popular aesthetics. They are sexy, voluptuous, sensual paintings, far from the cold, sterile and unimaginative gesturing and posturing of dry abstract expressionism or zombie formalism, born of the numinous universe of endless possibility. This is a populist decade in which the taste of the deplorables, the outsiders, the proletariat more accurately represent Hegel’s zeitgeist than either products built for the bourgeois marketplace, or the dated mediocrity of the diseased and institutional Academy which feeds it.

This is an apocalyptic age. It is a sublime age. Psychedelic and visionary art are dominated by explorations of the sublime, which is not the same as the beautiful, although each may generate the same stunned appreciation, the same degree of fascination, the same desire for unity. Unlike the beautiful, the sublime is the unknowable home of all gods, and the infinite and beckoning universe that in its majesty and glorious scale is home to endless variety and emergent change, always becoming. And yet the sublime is also marked by the disturbing idea that people may find pleasure in witnessing experiences that are founded in pain and suffering, horror and darkness. Sublime obscurity is the hiding place of fantasy, and the birthplace of imagination. The popularity of horror is founded in a love for the sublime.

Ruben Pang, Harmonic Precipitation, Oil, alkyd and synthetic varnish on aluminum composite panel. 39 2/5" × 31 1/2"

Perhaps the greatest achievement of art is when it shares the sublime and momentarily enwraps us in the terrifying yet pleasurable experience of being control-less, when the senses are overwhelmed, when we are embraced by a state of fear and awe. All of art’s other products, even the most exquisite and sophisticated delights of beauty, and doubtlessly all the other mundane and persuasive purposes it has been forced to serve, kneel before the magnitude of its capacity to share the sublime.

When artists explore previously unexamined areas of the sublime universe, the images they make may appear unintelligible and incomprehensible to the uninitiated – difficult to see – without understanding the nature of the spectacle they seek to express. They can only hint at the incredible scale of the multiverse they envision. Artists of the psychedelic and visionary sublime bring back fragments of their experience as documents of their efforts to apprehend the infinite, as journals of their voyages of discovery into madness, and excess. Their exploration is heroic. It is romantic. It is dangerous. But it is worth the risk as an honest correction to the deadly path of undead institutional art.

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