Vincent Mesaros : A quest for wisdom in an era of uncertainty

 

For many years, Vincent Mesaros has pursued what he calls a "philosophical quest"—not the mythical search for the stone that transmutes lead into gold, but pure research with no programmed end, where failure and infinitude are integrated into the process itself. This practice unfolds through drawing, fire, ceramics, video, text, and delegation, in a coherence that refuses any reassuring linearity.

Liminal Positions and Thresholds of the Invisible
Mesaros's work occupies a fundamentally liminal position—it stands at thresholds, in zones of passage between visible and invisible, presence and absence, material and immaterial. This liminality is not indecision but method: each work functions as a tipping point where habitual categories waver. Fire, central agent of this practice, perfectly embodies this position: it is simultaneously destruction and revelation, erasure and appearance.
But the systematic recourse to fire is not only formal process or aesthetic fascination. It directly summons ancient divinatory practices—pyromancy or spodomancy, reading the future in flames. When Mesaros burns a tarot card in "Small burn on fire, Repentance," or represents floral viscera in "Flore" (referencing anatomical plates but also haruspicy, reading entrails), he reactivates archaic modes of knowledge based on interpreting material signs to access the invisible. The ink stains of the "Monstres" series, evoking Rorschach tests, extend this projective logic where the unconscious — invisible by nature — reveals itself through informed matter.
This divinatory dimension traverses the entire work: ceramics charged with specific energies by a psychic (work in progress), large ritual compositions created in a state close to trance, crossed-out notebooks ("Griffes .txt") concealing texts that never existed. Everywhere, the work operates as support for projection and interpretation, refusing transparency of meaning to propose productive zones of opacity. This opacity is not elitist hermeticism but invitation to lived mystery, to sensible experience that resists immediate verbalization.

Dialectic of Saturation and Void
Two opposing regimes structure Mesaros's drawing practice. On one side, large ritual drawings in Indian ink saturate space to the point of illegibility, creating organic structures simultaneously evoking interior cartographies, neural networks, and automatic writing. On the other, sketches of withered flowers and necrophagous insects isolate figures in sacralized white space, privileging economy of means and contemplation.
This oscillation between fullness and emptiness, saturation and refinement, reveals two modalities of accessing mystery: through submersion in flux or through meditation on isolated form. In both cases, drawing becomes "design" in the Derridean sense—mental project traversing all supports. The reference to Derrida is not incidental: as with the philosopher, the trace in Mesaros is what remains of what no longer is, palimpsest where the visible is haunted by the invisible.
The contemporary vanitas constituted by these drawings of flowers and insects—agents of decomposition and regeneration—inscribe the work in an aesthetic of the cycle. What dies nourishes what lives, and attention paid to these generally rejected forms participates in rehabilitating the neglected, peripheral, non-spectacular. In this, Mesaros situates himself in a lineage running from 18th-century botanical plates to Ellsworth Kelly's plant drawings, but with a memento mori dimension anchoring these studies in reflection on finitude.

Critical Reactivation of Collective Narratives and Reuse
Urban legends, genre films, and news items traverse the work not as postmodern citations but as reactivated supports for belief. This strategy operates a double function: anchoring the work in shared imaginary while shifting these narratives from entertainment status to anthropological object. "Dépouille" (burned t-shirt bearing the inscription "High Hopes" referencing the Amityville murders), "Crying Children" (charcoal and ash portraits resurrecting cursed paintings burned in England in the 1980s), or "Mue (Heaven)" (denim jacket reprising the object from De Palma's film "Phantom of the Paradise"): these works function as profane relics of stories that survive their own destruction to become mythology.
The principle of reuse—recurrent in Mesaros—is not limited to narratives. It extends to everyday objects (school notebooks, clothing, coins), services (the psychic energy charger), technologies (text-generating AI). Each time, appropriation transforms the ontological status of what is reused. By transforming a jacket into relic or valuing coins thrown on the ground at five times their actual content ("Fontaine"), Mesaros reveals that value—artistic, symbolic, economic—never resides in materiality but in social consensus and belief accorded to it. The psychic is here appropriated as tool, just as Duchamp appropriated a urinal—but Mesaros pushes the logic to the immaterial: no longer the object that is ready-made but the service, the ritual, belief itself.

AI and Psychic: Immaterial Entities Producing Meaning
The systematic use of artificial intelligence, to generate critical texts and projections specific to infinite research accompanying his work, constitutes perhaps the most audacious aspect of his approach. This choice extends the delegation logic traversing the entire work: to fire (unpredictable transformation agent), to the psychic (energy charger), to the spectator ("Fontaine"), is added AI as discourse producer and analyses.
Now, the connection between AI and psychic is not metaphorical but structural. Both are immaterial entities supposed to produce meaning from inaccessible sources: the unconscious, spiritual world, beyond for the psychic; probabilistic models trained on massive corpora for AI. Both operate without ego, without proper intention—or at least claim this neutrality. Both are interfaces, channels through which transits speech that doesn't really belong to them.
This enunciative delegation creates an "oracle without ego," an instance producing meaning without affect or personal interest—critical utopia of desubjectified speech. But it simultaneously parodies conventional discourse on contemporary art, its rhetorical tics, obligatory references. AI, trained on existing corpora, can only be conservative, incapable of inventing new modes of thought. This limit then becomes the work's very subject: demonstrating that all critical discourse — any creation —, even human, is always already informed by preexisting structures.
By openly assuming this delegation, Mesaros takes position on the very nature of creation in the computational era. He affirms that authenticity doesn't reside in the human origin of the gesture but in the coherence of the global apparatus. AI, like the psychic, like fire, becomes an agent of transformation and controlled unpredictability—a tool to summon the invisible, to bring forth what wasn't predictable at the start.

The Textual as Parallel and Contaminating Practice
The literary journal, composed of fragments of urban reality observation, poetic neologisms ("moir," "jamaire"), and aborted fictions, constitutes the textual foundation of this practice. These writings capture social violence, precarity, daily incivilities—the same reality that plastic works seek to transmute.
Mesaros's prose, dense and fragmentary, evokes that of Blanchot or Bataille: refusal of linear narration, multiplication of viewpoints, discontinuous temporality. Invented neologisms function as conceptual tools creating new zones of thought. This textual dimension is neither illustration nor explanation of plastic work, but parallel practice contaminating the whole: drawings become writing, texts become visual matter.
School notebooks entirely crossed out ("Griffes .txt") literally embody this contamination: pages covered with Indian ink erasures, concealing writing that never existed, mentally constructed narratives never set down. Inspired by Baldessari's performance "I will not make anymore boring art," this series makes the gesture of erasing a creative act in itself. The suffix ".txt" evokes the illegible digital file, corrupted information, text become interior. Journal and drawings function as mirrors: one inscribes what might disappear, the other erases what attempts to appear.

A Work of Subsistence
This research aims neither at institutional recognition nor commercial success as end goal. It aims at subsistence: maintaining the gesture, continuing the quest, not giving in. This term—"subsistence"—returns as leitmotif in the journal and merits attention. It's not about simple biological survival but ontological persistence: continuing to be an artist under conditions that make this position increasingly difficult.
At a time when contemporary art is summoned to perform its value (number of views, likes, articles, prizes), Mesaros proposes long temporality, fidelity to a project promising no immediate return. This posture is not heroic but obstinate, almost stubborn. It resembles more that of the fundamental sciences researcher than the artist-entrepreneur.
The risk is obvious: this endless quest can appear as forward flight, refusal to confront the reality of the art world. But it's precisely this reality that Mesaros questions: must one necessarily adapt to dominant logics or can other modalities of presence be invented? Subsistence is not withdrawal but resistance, stubborn affirmation that another economy of art remains possible.

Productive Zones of Opacity and Mystery as Invitation
In a world saturated with images and information, in an era where all truth seems impossible to establish, this work proposes productive zones of opacity. Works function as divinatory objects, supports for projection and meditation open to multiple readings. This opacity is not defect but positioning: refusal of totalizing transparency, exhaustive explanation, immediate communication.
One might reproach this posture for potential elitism: by refusing immediate accessibility, doesn't it risk excluding those who don't possess the codes? But Mesaros doesn't cultivate hermeticism for hermeticism's sake. The opacity he proposes is not that of academic jargon but that of lived mystery, sensible experience that resists verbalization. Mystery is not obstacle but invitation—invitation to slow down, to look, to feel before understanding. In this sense, it is profoundly democratic: accessible to all those who accept to momentarily suspend the demand for immediate meaning.
Seeing this work in physical presence reveals what no reproduction transmits: the residual smell of fire in burned papers, the texture of fixed smoke, the immersive monumentality of ritual drawings, the troubling fragility of notebooks under glass, the ambiguous presence of charged ceramics, the intimacy of “meditative” drawings. It's a work that demands the body, time, slow attention. A work that subsists.

Limits and Unresolved Tensions
No artistic practice escapes its own contradictions, and Mesaros's is no exception. The first tension concerns the relationship between discourse and work: by multiplying texts (even AI-generated), doesn't he risk over-determining the reading of works that precisely call for interpretive openness? The second touches on accumulation: thirty years of production necessarily create a mass that can dilute the power of certain propositions. Finally, the question of transmissibility arises: can this endless quest create school, or is it by nature untransferable?
These tensions are not weaknesses but symptoms of a living practice, in becoming, that refuses the reassuring closure of the finished system. They maintain the work in a state of productive unease, far from any definitive crystallization.

Through this infinite quest, could introspection come into play, opening up to a transmutation of being, to a vision and relationship with the world as an alternative and a means of subsistence?

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_AI-generated text