The Mental Imagery¹ of Adrian Ionita
(Adrian Ionita now goes by his American name, Larry Bonn Phoenix)

Adrian Silvan Ionescu Ph.D.

Cronica Romana, August 2002

An artist with many resources in the field of the visual arts, Adrian Ionita chose for the upcoming Around the Coyote Art Festival ² a surprisingly new and original genre of artistic expression: the hypnagogic drawing.³ Living in a complete dark room in a sensory deprivation experiment, at the threshold between reality and dream, he makes drawings of mental images⁴. "Projected " on a drawing pad marked by four phosphorescent dots, the mental images are traced with a pencil sporting a little ring marked by another phosphorescent dot.

Haunting images seen with the mind's eye⁵ is not an easy task. Some of them, deposited in the imaginary museum of our mind, are familiar objects and creatures, while others, coming out ex nihilo seem unaltered by the exercise of our memory. Resembling a stream of fluid and evanescent fragments, zooming in and out in a morphing mixture of a fleeting dance, the mental images are forcing the (self) observer to a game of abandon, speedy dexterity and distributive attention. Researching the invariants of our internal reality, Adrian Ionita replaces the classical image of the artist doing a gestural drawing in the front of an external model. Submerged in darkness, he behaves like a blind copyist of his own thoughts in a live action on the ponds of our consciousness⁶. Many of his drawings are a chaotic overlapping of mental tracings⁷ from which an observant eye may decipher a human profile, the bud of a flower or a fantastic animal descended from the walls of the Lascoux Cavern.⁸

This experiment, done only in a highly meditative state, when repeated for a long period comes with a price. On the razorblade between realities, when you do not know if it is day or night, if you are awake or in a dream, confusion and disorientation are a norm. Nevertheless, the artist seems trained to this rope dancing. Twenty years ago, in a show called Idea⁹, he presented a series of drawings called Smoke, in which this ethereal medium is envisioned as a deconspirator of the invisible activity of the air. He defines the result of his efforts as extractions ¹⁰ of ideas developed on the mind's screen, a reflection of the thought in action. Most of them were hypnopompic drawings¹¹, drawings done in the morning, when our mental mood - just escaped from the vivid exercise of our last dream ¹² - seems to flavor our mental images with more incisiveness and color. The next step planned by the artist is to make drawings while asleep, labeled as somnambulation drawings¹³. With many of his ambitious projects ¹⁴, Adrian Ionita identifies itself with a new avant-garde.

He is researching the limits of our mental imagery in a process of spiritual archeology that deserves all of our support and encouragement.

Annotations:
The text in Romanian contains a short biographical introduction. The notes, photos and related bibliographical references were added only for the English version.

Adrian Silvan Ionescu Ph.D, a member of the Romanian Academy, is an art critic and teacher at the Nicolae Grigorescu Institute of Fine Arts from Bucharest Romania. He traveled extensively troughout United States as a recipient of a Smithsonian Institution fellowship.

1. Mental imagery (sometimes colloquially called visualization, or "seeing in the mind's eye") is experience that resembles perceptual experience, but which occurs in the absence of the appropriate stimuli for the relevant perception. (From Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy).

2. Around the Coyote Art Festival. Held in Chicago between 13 -15 of September 2002, is the largest multimedia arts festival from Midwest.

3. Hypnagogic drawing: According to Andreas Mavromatis ( Hypnagogia, 1987, Routledge, London), hypnagogic experiences are commonly defined as hallucinatory and quasi-hallucinatory events taking place in the intermediate state between wakefulness and sleep. While many of the drawings done by the surrealist, dada or visionary artists are an interpretation or reconstruction of a dreamscape or hallucination, a posteriori to their mental experience, the hypnagogic drawing is done in vivo, resembling the drawings done with a Camera Lucida. They are contour tracings of mental images and can be easily mistaken as automatic, blindfolded or modified contour drawings.

4. Mental images: Pylyshyn, Z.W. (1973). What the Mind's Eye Tells the Mind's Brain: A Critique of Mental Imagery. Psychological Bulletin (80) 1-25. [A seminal attack on pictorial accounts of imagery. This was the opening salvo of the infamous analog/propositional dispute.]
Kosslyn, S.M. & Pomerantz, J.R. (1977). Imagery, Propositions and the Form of Internal Representations. Cognitive Psychology (9) 52-76. [A defence of Quasi-Pictorial theory against "propositional"/descriptional alternatives.]

5. The mind's eye:

6. Consciousness:

7. Mental tracings: The hypnagogic drawings executed during the first stage of the hypnagogic experience, also known as the fleeting stage, are chaotic, move and morph rapidly in different forms. During this stage, the artist has more control of his body and movements. As he progresses in later stages, which are more colorful and the mental images are structured and fully formed, he looses the coordination of his body and falls in sleep. Since the mental images have such a short live, from a fraction of a second to several seconds, the tracings done on the drawing pad are overlapping each other. To overcome this disadvantage, Adrian Ionita perfected the Mental Camera Lucida, a computer drawing software combined with a digital tablet and e-glasses. The phosphorescent dot is replaced this time by a luminous pixel seen through the e-glasses on a dark screen and the drawings are saved in a flipbook in the sequence in which were traced. The pages of the flipbook can be changed with a keystroke whenever a mental images leaves the mental screen. This way they can be printed or played back as a short animation.

8. Lascoux Cavern:

9. Idea:

10. Extractions: Extractions are the interpretation and refinement of the ideas generated by a hypnagogic experience. When observed passively some of the mental images seem to have a "mind" of their own, but in many cases, through exercises they can be rotated, modeled, dissected, etc. as happens in lucid dreaming when the dreamer can direct the script of his dream. Images which are coming uninvited to our mental screen seem to be less contaminated by what we know about objects and phenomena in the real world or what we expect them to do. They are the central subject of Adrian Ionita's research, since they can reveal the invariable proprieties and mechanisms governing the visual mental imagery.

11. Hypnopompic drawings:
12. Dream:
13. Somnambulation drawings:
14. Projects: