Visionaries

Visionaries is a sampling of Visionary Art which moves forward chronologically and selectively from Stanley Spencer to Street Artists while referencing Blake and Goya as giants on whose shoulders all Visionary Artists stand.

The exhibition sets up a series of polarities that derive, on the one hand, from Blake’s visions of spiritual reality breaking into the material world and on the other, from Goya’s nightmares revelling in the material reality of death and decay. The two are opposed as twin gateways at the exhibition’s entrance where a Stanley Spencer study for the Betrayal in the Garden, in which the everyday provides the setting for the mythic, faces down two of the Chapman Brothers’ revised and improved etchings from Los Caprichos, in which Goya’s original images of human vice are themselves defaced and destroyed.

The strongest works in this exhibition are those which work with these polarities in place of resolving them in one direction alone. Noel White’s Downland Discourse features three travellers walking between the parallel worlds of flesh and spirit with the central character of the three holding together the polarities towards which his colleagues veer. The Black Madonna of Norman Adams is integrated into the garden in which she stands, her form echoed by the natural geometry of which she is part. Here, darkness and light form one whole.

Crossing the Water to the Promised Land by Albert Herbert depicts turmoil and upheaval as a baptism through which we pass to emerge as children returning home. Peter Howson Legion portrays the violent expulsion of the demonic in the claustrophobic context of a fevered crowd by a Christ who is calmness personified. Adam Neate creates an icon of suffering humanity by transcending his transient materials of cardboard and spray paint, a reversal of iconographic technique and materials.

Meryl Doney, who has curated Visionaries, writes of Visionary Art as existing on the margins of contemporary art yet stubbornly refusing to wither and die. Its place can be that of the unheard, unregarded prophet, the holy fool crying out in the wilderness. Its strength, and that of this exhibition, is the vigour and passion with which the spiritual and material territories of the human condition are explored.

Visionaries is at the Wallspace Gallery, London, 20 May to 10 June and Greenbelt Arts Festival, Cheltenham, 28 to 31 August.

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Bob Dylan - Every Grain Of Sand.