What if, today, while we are living through multiple crises and in particular a spiritual crisis without an access to the sensitive, complex or metaphysical horizon of humans, the arts are still carries the possibility of being a place of a meeting between the feelings, emotions, the non-comprehensible that is often seen as supernatural and the natural?
The Arts, from its origins, had magical or sacred roots and functions: it made it possible to connect humans to other realities – interrogating the world of the soul, the world of the ancestors or the forces of nature. It was a way of acting upon the un-comprehensible as the uncontrollable, at times looking to influence the course of events or at other times securing the good graces of the unknown phenomena mysticisms.
The Arts were and are mediators, as they are means of communication between two authenticities or realities, as these were of two worlds.
In other words, The arts – an artificial creation or an image - were acts of transgression initiated by a human being defying the prohibitions and limits of his condition to understand the universe; these appear with the great questions about the cycle of existence, with for example the first tombs, as witness of the birth of consciousness.
These objects made it possible to materialize what is of the order of the intangible, the invisible. The objects - sacred - inhabited, invested with a spiritual charge were used in rituals, accompanied by music and dance with the aim of transforming, metamorphosing reality, or conquering a spell. In the past, too, the divinatory arts were practiced, while alchemy was considered the supreme art of transmutation.
Throughout the history of humanity, artists have never ceased to perpetuate these traditions of a also messenger arts, symbolic arts, reviving the function of the shamanism. Thus, surrealism came into contact, through artistic processes, with the power of the unconscious and of the spirit world. Pollock's dripping was inspired by Navajo Indian rituals. Basquiat, like many contemporary Haitian artists, was nourished by Voodoo. Kieth Heiring was influenced by traditional Mayan figures; Raw art, as all outsiders arts, naive art and folk art have sometimes been the spokespersons for the odd, of the invisible, as of the un tangible experiences or emotions of the reality. Some artists have created protective, healing works, such as Louise Bourgeois or Annette Messager, Nancy Spiro, while Michel Nedjar's dolls look like voodoo dolls and the Black Dolls in Deborah Neff collection, are exceptional un told tells of the history of Black Americans that through objects with multiple and sometimes enigmatic functions, expressed not allowed identities, spirits or emotions of slaves.