It flourishes in moments of tragedy, uncertainty, crisis. When the world as we know it falters, the desire to seek explanations and comfort outside of rational thought resurfaces. In France, after the industrial revolution, symbolism developed. It was one of the most important literary movements of the end of the 19th century and which the Greek poet Jean Moréas defined as “a style hostile to teaching, declamation, false sensitivity and objective thought”. And what could be more irrational than card reading to risk your future?
“We live in a time of global crisis and ideas about psychomagic which subvert the most normative thinking,” explains Pilar Soler Montes, curator of the exhibition, in statements to this newspaper. The inverted tower. Tarot as form and symbol. “It’s the ideal place to revisit the tarot and its thousands of applications,” Soler continues as he walks through the silent rooms of La Casa Encendida in Madrid, which hosts the exhibition until January 5.
The exhibition aims to address – from an artistic point of view and with a total of 12 artists – the widespread and renewed interest of contemporary art and counterculture in tarot cards. Scenes from Cleo from 5 to 7 (Agnès Varda, 1962) until it was recorded that an Andy Warhol with more substance than blood in his veins was giving the members of the Velvet Underground a night of partying while a very young tarot reader read their futures.
All this through the Black Power Tarot (2014, by King Khan and supervised by Alejandro Jodorowsky) which claims blackness and illustrates the 22 major arcana of the game with African-American historical figures, thus giving a new dimension to the game and the the story of Tarot itself. Anti-racist struggles; a character who looks a lot like Tina Turner opens a lion’s mouth in the letter Strength. Or even by the sculptures of the Mexican Raúl de Nieves (1983), including baby inexhaustible imaging work Mexican crafts, Catholicism, tarot, drag and punk. Without forgetting the painting of a very young Johanna Dumet or the letters with explicit sexual images from Dorothy Iannone (1933 – 2022), a housewife who discovered pleasure and art by leaving her husband after having had an affair with Swiss artist Dieter Roth. who will open the doors for her to be the one who – literally – designs her life.
The pastime of the elite
The first appearance of ordinary tarot decks in Christian Europe could be traced to 1310 in the kingdoms of the Iberian Peninsula. That year, the Council of Hundred banned card games in what is now Barcelona. However, the main references to tarot date from the 15th century and come from northern Italy. The oldest game belonged to Filippo Maria Visconti, Duke of Milan. It was then a game reserved for the elites.
“It is something that has always been linked to art, it was born almost with the artists of the Italian Renaissance and it was shortly before the Second World War, in the 19th century, that it was given all the mystical and esoteric component, and they began to work with avant-garde artists, appropriating the symbols and subverting the traditional game,” explains Soler. It was then, after the war, that it became an element. popular It passes from the cultural elites to a more popular layer.
The question then becomes when gambling begins to be considered a belief. According to Soler, this happened in the 18th century, when it was associated with Freemasonry. “All the symbolism that we know today coincides with the beginning of the discoveries of Egypt. There, they begin to invent a series of mystical stories about cartomancy and card playing,” he continues. And finally, in the 19th century, with all the esotericism appearing in Europe, in addition to being associated with avant-garde artists, it also came closer to increasingly magical thoughts.
“My grandmother was a bit of a witch. “I remember that she had been reading letters since she was a child,” says artist Johanna Dumet, who has just entered the scene. Dumet, 33, is the youngest artist participating in the exhibition and, by the time the conversation takes place, she has returned to touch up the final details of her work. She is French and grew up in a small town “in the middle of nowhere”. “We had almost no neighbors. Just goats and forests and I was a very creative girl,” she recalls. And he had fun watching his grandmother throw the cards. “He never let anyone touch his letters, it was something very intimate, very personal. I only saw the print once,” he explains. They fascinated him. Mystical, almost within reach, always preserved in their red velvet covers.
Little by little, he learned to throw them. First as a game, then as a way of composing images and captivating stories. And she read a lot. I wanted to know what they meant, to grasp their mysteries. But one day he realized he didn’t want to play them. She wanted to paint. And painting is what he does.
“I am a visual artist. That’s what I do, and that’s why I started working on these series,” he continues, emphasizing his interpretation of the major arcana hanging, in order, on the living room wall. For her they are magical figures, they do not represent just any drawing. “They have an energy, there’s something about these symbols that makes us artists drawn to them again and again,” he says.
How magical thinking works
Being Pisces, Aquarius, having the moon in Mercury retrograde. Horoscope and tarot are trending on social networks. Several times with a touch of irony. Others, almost like a promise. When asked why in 2024, Chus Martínez, director of Art Gender Nature at the FHNW Academy of Arts and Design in Basel, thinks she has the answer. As he writes in the article published in the exhibition catalogue.
For her, magic of all kinds, like technology of all kinds, has invested generously in visualization. “Virtual digital worlds visualize scenarios of speculation but also of consumption. We are invited to see the interior of these worlds and also to inhabit them, to move and act in them. “They are safe,” he wrote. And magical thinking works the same way.
“If you are Pisces, for example, the horoscope defines your traits and a certain space that is yours; It belongs to your Pisces character. It also has certain doors that allow your personality not to feel confined, to be able to expand to a certain point,” the scholar continues, emphasizing that it seems logical that we encounter the horoscope in many places each day. This is usually a short text placed next to a symbol. A symbol that might seem banal, but which, according to him, “we have not succeeded in creating similar symbols for social rights, for example by inviting people to visualize what their possibilities are.”
