Mysterium Coniunctionis — imagination as an alchemy of being

I borrowed the title Mysterium Coniunctionis from the work of C. G. Jung because this collection took shape as an exploration of the unconscious. Through painting, I embarked on a journey toward myself, but also toward the world around me—toward that outer unconscious which accompanies our gestures, runs through nature, and reveals itself when the gaze ceases to believe it already knows things.

At first, the images appear beautiful and familiar. They show flowers, birds, animals, fruit, vases, and a few objects. Yet I did not seek to refine them through a technique that would produce the illusion of reality. The painting had to remain open enough to restore the imaginary: my own, but also that of those who will look at it.

Most of the subjects were not painted from a model. Some exist only within the image; others once existed and then resurfaced from memory. They took shape on the canvas from a recollection, a sensation, or a gesture that did not yet know its destination. Form thus appeared before it could be explained.

The journey toward oneself and the return to the world

We often imagine the inner path as the discovery of a better self, finally freed from its shadows. But individuation, in Jung, does not promise an ideal version of the self. It demands a confrontation with what had been rejected, forgotten, or projected onto others. Conjunction does not abolish opposites: it invents a form capable of holding them together.

Sometimes we do not find the extraordinary self we had hoped to bring back into the world. Yet the journey transforms us. In the course of the inward voyage, the outer world discloses itself differently. A flower, an animal, or a fruit ceases to be an already familiar object; it becomes a presence once more. This reverse journey toward reality is as important as the discovery of oneself.

The paintings follow this double movement. They descend toward obscure matter, then return toward sensory light. Black, white, blue, green, red, and gold do not designate mechanical stages. They form a mobile vocabulary in which nigredo, albedo, citrinitas, and rubedo can coexist.

The image that gives form

Kant calls the faculty of imagination Einbildungskraft. In its productive function, it does not merely fabricate fantastic images: it connects sensory diversity and makes ordered experience possible. Painting makes this operation visible. It brings together received impressions, memories, colours, and gestures to form a reality that has never existed in precisely this way.

For Paul Ricœur, productive imagination refigures reality. The symbol gives rise to thought because it possesses a surplus of meaning; metaphor brings distant realities together and opens a possible world before the work. The painting is therefore not a refuge outside the world. It is a proposition for inhabiting it differently.

The work of this collection is inseparable from my concern with the study of imagination and the human imaginary. I seek not only to know what images represent, but how they are born, how they connect what has been perceived with what does not yet exist, and how, in return, they transform both the person who creates them and the person who looks at them.

This is why the presentation of each painting includes a brief excursion into the thought of philosophers who have questioned this faculty. Kant allows us to approach imagination as a power of synthesis and formation; Ricœur, as the power to refigure reality and open possible worlds; Sartre, as the act by which consciousness can posit its object in its absence and free itself from the hold of what is immediately given. Other voices—from Bachelard to Corbin—illuminate poetic matter, dreamed space, or the distinct consistency of the imaginal.

These perspectives are not summoned to confine the works within a demonstration. They accompany their central question: how does an inner image manage to take bodily form and, once visible, bring forth a world that did not previously exist in this form?

I wanted to go a little further in understanding this miracle through which the human being becomes a co-creator of the world—or of worlds. Scientific literature devoted to perception, mental imagery, memory, emotion, and aesthetic experience offers another language here. It shows that imagination is not a marginal activity opposed to knowledge, but a complex function that recombines experience, anticipates possible situations, and participates in the construction of meaning.

The uncensored inner expression that breaks through and takes shape in immediate reality can be understood as an alchemy of being. It transforms impression into gesture, memory into presence, and contradiction into image. It encounters luminosity not as light separated from matter, but as that which seeks to appear through it.

Looking with the brain and with history

Neuroaesthetics does not provide a universal key to the work. Rather, it shows that looking is a distributed activity: the brain analyses contrasts, groups forms, anticipates movement, recognises living beings, and mobilises memory, emotion, and systems of value. An ambiguous image keeps perceptual predictions open; a personally meaningful image can engage networks connected with autobiographical memory and reflection on the self.

Each painting thus creates an encounter between a visible organisation and the spectator’s singular history. The neuroaesthetic analyses proposed in this catalogue describe possible mechanisms, not compulsory reactions. They respect what art preserves as irreducible: no two people ever see exactly the same image, because they do not bring the same life to it.

This collection follows the movement of matter becoming image and of image returning to life. From the inaugural peacock to the celestial garden of Natura caelestis, the works do not recount a linear progression. They compose a constellation. Each illuminates the others; each contains a part of their night.