​“Not only are we the products of multiple entangled ancestors, spanning vast ranges of the evolutionary field; we are not even individuals at all. Rather, we are walking assemblages: riotous communities of multi-species, multi-bodied beings, inside and outside of our very cells. Life is soupy, mixed up and tumultuous. Muddying the waters is precisely the point, because it’s from such nutritious streams that life grows.”

James Bridle, “Ways of Being: Animals, Plants, Machines: The Search for the Planetary Intelligence”

Odilon Redon’s symbolic art is never disembodied, mystical as it is. On the contrary, his aesthetic, otherworldly as it may be seen, is firmly rooted in the tangible and the material. The real and the fantastic are parts of the same mystery of Life. Paul Gauguin was of the same opinion,

“Thus, we take for real the strange creatures populating Redon’s drawings…. In his work. dreams become reality because of the believability he gives them. All of his plants, his embryonic and essentially human creatures have lived with us beyond a doubt…” (1)

And as Redon phrased it himself, what his art did was put “the logic of the visible at the service of the invisible.” (2)

Life captured by Redon seems to be governed by the law of metamorphosis; it is never static, always changing and becoming, never fully formed. Like in the alchemical opus, his painting evolved from an early nigredo – the black period, which brought his noirs, towards light and colour of his later years. In his art, there is constant shapeshifting, not only of forms and organisms, but also of colours, which melt into one another in wonderful diffusion.

He was especially fascinated by the theory of evolution and the sea as the cradle of life. As Hauptmann writes,

“For Redon, the swirling sea and its creatures anemones, sea horses, coral (it is interesting to note that these pictures do not include larger marine animals like fish, sharks, dolphins, and whales, concentrating instead on those on the lower rungs of the evolutionary ladder) became the perfect subject for an aesthetic focused on change and transformation.”

Especially beautiful is his “Underwater Vision” with Neptune who “dissolves into the texture of the water,” clad in beautiful coral robes. (3) The creatures of the sea are unidentifiable here: it is hard to say if they are plants, animals or perhaps both. Oannes is another mythical amphibious being portrayed by Redon.  In ancient Mesopotamia, Oannes is described as a creature with the lower body of a fish and the upper body of a human. He emerged from the ocean in order to impart wisdom to humanity.

In 1913 Redon published a collection of lithographs called Origines, in which he explored the themes of creation and evolution. There he depicted “a place of chaos and indeterminacy, of murky swamplands” and “the prehistoric mire.” (4). Despite Darwin’s theory of evolution, which was put forward in Redon’s lifetime, many still believed then, as they do even now, that humans are the crown of creation, that the human shape is the crowning achievement of the evolutionary process. Redon’s vision denies this illusion:

“By grafting human features onto the most shapeless creatures known to science, Redon has radically revised long-held models of human corporeality rooted in the idea of an original wholeness: man’s origins are as formless, as base, as the earliest primordial matter. Moreover, what Redon seems to articulate in this album is that this original, lacking state can never be overcome…” (5).

Only now does science slowly wake up to the idea that human intelligence does not stand above creation. Redon was aware that all forms of life live in entanglement (6). What is more, he seems to have known that “there are no hierarchies: no ‘higher’ or ‘lower’; none more, or less, evolved. Everything is intelligent.” (7) Everything is conscious and consciousness permeates everything, and that explains the symbolic value of the eye, which appears in so many Redon’s paintings.

Notes:

(1) Hauptman, J. (2005). Beyond the Visible: The Art of Odilon Redon. Museum of Modern Art.

(2) Ibid.

(3) Ibid.

(4) Martha Lucy, “Into the Primeval Slime: Body and Self in Redon’s Evolutionary Universe” https://www.erudit.org/en/journals/racar/2009-v34-n1-racar05297/1069497ar/

(5) Ibid.

(6) James Bridle (2022). Ways of Being: Animals, Plants, Machines: The Search for the Planetary Intelligence. Penguin.

(7) Ibid.