At the frontiers of the possible, to the summits of imagination.

“Doubt is the mother of ideas; only the ignorant and the fanatical never hesitate.”
Stefan Zweig

1. What a lot of clouds 

It is all coming to an end. We live with the feeling of having reached the conclusion of a paradigm, of living at the boundaries of something that cannot be sustained, straddling a frontier. Things cannot carry on like this. We no longer feel as we did before the pandemic, and we have learned that some unforeseen disaster may overtake us at any moment; there is no way back from the degradation that social media have introduced into the ways people love and relate to each other; genuine creativity will be annihilated by AI, etc., etc. These, and other bleak visions of the future foreshadowed in the present, accompany us in our daily lives. They are fatalistic forebodings, baleful feelings, heralded by a conviction that we are living at a pivotal moment, a hiatus. But haven’t we had this same feeling recurrently throughout the course of human history? Haven’t we always been hovering on the edge of angst? Hasn’t every generation believed itself to be the nexus of change? In his memoirs, The World of Yesterday (1942), the Austrian writer Stefan Zweig refers to the vague malaise that can engulf a person in any era. The feeling of uncertainty as a particular sign of our times is based on the current situation of exhaustion of natural resources, so that the capitalist house of cards built on the model of eternal abundance seems to be tottering. The premise of perpetual growth — as physics tells us — is impossible. So it seems we are indeed coming to the end of a cycle, and now it is time to degrow.

This emotional cocktail, served up by the media, seasoned with the pessimistic aftertaste inherent in the human condition and topped off with a little spicy touch added by the fashion for dystopian fiction, is the drink of our times. And its consumption is followed by a feeling of doubt in the stomach and a belch of uncertainty. I would draw attention to a painting by Charris from over 20 years ago, which already foreshadowed the painter’s concerns with hiatuses, with the vertiginous feeling of facing a present that is consuming itself and a self-immolating future; on that canvas, entitled Nochevieja I [New Year’s Eve I], painted by Charris in 1996, some matches spelling the word futuro hovered at the edge of a beach, threatening to burst into flame. This painting, which Charris did as a (somewhat facetious) comment on the so-called Y2K problem, once again leaves us up in the air, uncertain of what will happen after the conflagration.

But let us make uncertainty — doubt — the driving force of our ideas, as Zweig suggests at the beginning of this text. The creations that have sprung from Charris’s imagination, grouped together under the title Futurama, might seem to be visions of the future and the end, but they are actually doubts about the present, visions of all those faults and cracks that the media, conversations and our own existence generate in our daily lives. They are disturbing, idyllic, often hilarious images... but above all, they are doubts, hesitations that make us feel we are floating. “This disorientation is partly due to the loss of a stable horizon”, writes the German essayist Hito Steyerl. “And with the loss of horizon also comes the departure of a stable paradigm of orientation, which has situated concepts of subject and object, of time and space, throughout modernity. In falling, the lines of the horizon shatter, twirl around, and superimpose” (in The Wretched of the Screen, 2014). Free fall and suspension are excellent metaphors for the state in which we find ourselves when confronted with the decisions we have to make in our unstable present, riddled with uncertainties. Similarly, superficiality, hedonism and the display of happiness are characteristic of the information circulating today in digital culture, conveying a general feeling of floating and wanting to float, heightened by the literal location of information in the levitating space that the web makes possible, that is, in an abstract global sphere where time and space are rescaled. No wonder Charris’s paintings are full of clouds, mists, vapours and haze: like the enchanted heights of Lawren Harris, like the nebulous underworld of Arnold Böcklin, what a lot of clouds there are in Charris’s paintings! 

2. Dystopias and arcana 

An interesting friction is created between the title Charris has chosen to group together his latest visions, Futurama, and the concept of dystopia that beats at the heart of them. Devised by the industrial designer Norman Bel Geddes, Futurama was first of all an exhibit held at the New York World’s Fair in 1939 with the aim of showing what society would be like in 1960, that is, twenty years later. Its slogan was “The World of Tomorrow” and it was a great success. Sponsored by General Motors, Futurama opened up a world of skyscrapers, motorways and cars — of promises of safety, mobility and autonomy — before the eyes of visitors of the 1930s, eager for novelty: an obliging, automated convenience of polished surfaces. Futurama conveyed the infectious optimism of constant growth towards a utopia of happiness and well-being. The impact of this exhibit in the public sphere sparked off the profusion of “futuristic” expressions and forms in popular culture (in films and series, but also in design, fashion and advertising), forms that today — in the first third of the twenty-first century — we refer to as “retrofuturism”. Charris, always very sensitive to all the fantastic whims of the pop repertoire, recalls that robot that caused a sensation in Futurama 1939 in his painting Tecnolatría [Technolatry]. 

But what happened to the utopia of safety, well-being and progress? After the Fair closed in 1940, practically all the installations were dismantled due to the need for materials for the Second World War. It is no coincidence that in the following decades, the forties and fifties, the term dystopia was popularised to refer to an intrinsically undesirable fictitious society, at the opposite pole to what is ideal for everyone. In this period, the 1932 novel Brave New World by the writer, inveterate traveller and spiritualist Aldous Huxley was championed and the other two canonical works in the literary triumvirate of dystopia, 1984 (George Orwell, 1947–48) and Fahrenheit 451 (Ray Bradbury, 1953), were published. They speak of the alienation of the individual, the deceptions of the state and its manipulations of the popular imaginary, social engineering, pervasive mediocrity, how democracies can evolve into totalitarian societies, rampant consumerism, overcrowding... In short, dystopias were forebodings, fictionalised prophecies speculating on possibilities that were beginning to rear their heads. The maturity that the world war brought to Western society led to a catharsis in which dreams of utopia turned to dust and dystopia was welcomed. Futuramas, that is, the imaginaries of science fiction (which finally reached their golden age in the 1960s), were eventually undermined by pessimism. But we should not blame dystopias: they are just exercises in anticipation, attempts to detect faults, forecasts that want to work out where the system is going to break down. Watching out for dangers is more intelligent than hedonistically savouring the sweets of comfort. 

Nowadays dystopias are in fashion, and as we were saying, they add a touch of spice to the general bitterness. The imaginary scenarios of Black Mirror become flagrantly outdated in a single season; even dystopia finds it hard to stay ahead of the game. Ironically, Charris calls his forebodings Futurama, and I say ironically because that 1939 exhibit in New York (and its updated version, Futurama II, held in 1964) were meant to instil confidence in the future. Charris’s Futurama, by contrast, reveals an undercurrent of bitterness, and not only because it paints the future black, but because of the very impossibility of portraying it, as a painter. Images of the future created by painters are a catalogue of the fears, obsessions or hopes of each era, a map of possible directions rather than anything else. 

Possible paths, different directions. Which should we chose, which way should we go? Can the arts of divination help us solve these dilemmas? As a civilization, we have trusted in such methods for almost our entire history. Wanting to know the future is a human impulse closely related to the need to be in control. Although Charris in his Futurama does not seem consciously inclined to embrace these options, his paintings have a veil of mystery and a certain aroma of mysticism, with olfactory notes of occult and hermetic traditions reverberating beneath. His paintings, in many cases, are “paintings from the other side”, alluding to a panorama of invisible forces, parallel universes that suggest many possible presents and futures (Too Late, Et in Arcadia Adorno clonado [Et in Arcadia Adorno Cloned], El viaje a Marte [The Journey to Mars]). His pictures offer us a glimpse of simultaneous settings that reveal the bitterness characteristic of dystopia, as shown in such dispiriting works as Universos paralelos [Parallel Universes] and Un negocio muy elástico [A Very Elastic Business]. The defence of chaos theory and the fallibility of science emerges in El efecto mariposa [The Butterfly Effect], that fantastic vision spawned from some recess of Charris’s imaginative mind, which secretly calculates effects and consequences on a global scale. 

The painter’s visions have been filled with dots and shadings in Futurama, and this picture, El efecto mariposa, is a good example. Where do those compulsive, capricious patterns come from, halfway between coded signs and decorative borders? They are manifestations of the unconscious, forms that emerge for reasons that are not entirely clear and are part of an unprecedented, secret composition. Like Hilma af Klint, Charris has turned on the tap of automatism, this time in a way that is still under control. In the future I would love to see the painter open the water tank of the unconscious all the way.

Rising above these waters of pure intuition like a lighthouse is La torre [The Tower], an eighteen-piece Babel-like construction that recalls a house of cards, a symbol of instability, but also a wonderful example of a play of presentiments. In the free association of small-scale images (probably extracted more naturally from the subconscious), I see a fertile territory of freedom that Charris has allowed himself in which to express his imagination. La torre is a watchtower paved with images that recalls the pack of cards designed by Charles and Ray Eames, a construct midway between architecture, play and the most arcane expressions of the individual imagination and the collective unconscious.

3. Emosido engañado [We’ve been had] 

Like a solitary captain at the helm of a ship plying the misty sea of the present (and seeing no land on the horizon), Charris throws his dice, that is, his predictive visions and his coloured ideas. They are opinions, social comments and questionings of the present and the future that lies ahead, and sometimes, like true prophecies, they anticipate what is coming. This is true of Masculino [Masculine], a painting that shows a military squad with the traditional Mr Potato toy on their backs. They are carrying it on their shoulders in a snowy landscape, a space far removed from the playroom that is the natural habitat of this figure. Why? Mr Potato has to take his roadworthiness test and must be withdrawn from circulation to check his status as an emblem of masculinity. And strangely enough, after Charris did the painting, Hasbro (the manufacturer of Potato Head) decided to replace the traditional name Mr Potato by just Potato, in the interests of education in gender equality and binarism. Charris avant la lettre. 

In this red-hot review of current events, groups such as denialists (Negacionistas [Denialists]) and tourists (Turistas [Tourists], El Viaje a Marte [Journey to Mars]) pass through Charris’s reinterpretative filter, reflected as new explorers with echoes of missionaries from other eras, at once heroic and pathetic, driven to the limits of sanity by their inner convictions. Multipintoresquismo [Multipicturesquism] is an accurate critical view of what we celebrate today as multiculturalism: the utopia of enriching coexistence of the different cultures that make up the human mosaic is and will remain pure outward show, superficial complementarity of different patterns. Nothing more. 

Environmental problems and exhaustion of natural resources — an absolutely seminal theme in classic dystopias — emerge in Charris’s paintings in the form of monsters, nature that has got to its feet, beyond exhaustion, and is proving hostile to us. La desaparición de los insectos [The Disappearance of Insects] is like a bad dream, a muffled threat worthy of being the plot of a good eco-horror film. A group of people seem bewildered and paralysed; they look right and left, scan the horizon, and one of them examines the sky through binoculars. The title of the painting tells us what is happening: the insects have disappeared. Is it perhaps the beginning of a chain of extinctions, or have the insects withdrawn in order to reappear mutated and stronger? This painting perfectly represents the uncertainty to which we are subjected in times of climate change, times in which Nature, as mother and superhuman force, is taking its revenge.

A similar message is conveyed in the painting Akkorokamui, based on the traditional Japanese legend of the giant red octopus god, a deity with powerful tentacles that has the ability to regenerate itself despite the wounds and attacks inflicted on it by ignorant humans. Legends, prodigious events essential for understanding the cohesion and formation of societies, have served us since antiquity to enable human beings to explain natural phenomena that occur, endowing those stories with religious, transcendental, spiritual force. In Akkorokamui, the octopus symbolises the way we treat nature nowadays, and reminds us of an immanent law: as you treat it, so it will treat you. The painting is inspired by the Hiroshigue III print Hunting the Giant Octopus of Namekawa in Etchu Province from 1877, but Charris has added his own pop twist, and we find the cute octopus as threatening and spine-chilling as the It clown devised by Stephen King.

In short, masculinity, far from being an innate blessing with which one had been favoured merely by being born within a patriarchal society, is today a hairy, jagged construct, a bundle of problems; life is a race in a labyrinth, full of mirages, false doors and ideological quicksands; nature is getting its own back on us and is determined to avenge its wrongs. This is not what we envisaged when we opened the 1939 Futurama in such style. So it seems that, yes, we’ve been had — emosido engañado, to quote the popular viral meme that has constantly been appearing on screens in Spain since 2016 to express general disillusionment. Charris’s Futurama reflects the use of art as a projection of the fears and frustrations of the present, even when speaking of the future.

4. Fleeing to Mount Analogue 

I was leaving with a group of friends to seek the Mountain which is the path joining Earth and Sky. It must exist somewhere on our planet, and must be the dwelling of a superior humanity. This was proven rationally by the man we called Father Sogol, our senior in mountain matters and the leader of the expedition. 
(Fragment from Mount Analogue by René Daumal, 1944) 

Mount Analogue is an extraordinary book. Halfway between an adventure novel and a philosophical essay, this brief, unfinished text by René Daumal is a pioneering treatment of a journey as an initiatory experience. A journey to a non-existent place (a mountain that is not visible to human eyes, the so-called Mount Analogue), on a blind mission in which the participants are a group of eight idealists who meet through a newspaper advertisement. The expedition is led by a certain Father Sogol, a character who symbolises inversion of logic and renunciation of reason, since Sogol is Logos backwards. Into this adventure story Daumal, a French poet who had a brief career and a premature death (he died leaving Mount Analogue unfinished), poured all his beliefs about Western esotericism, Kabbalah and Eastern religions, which appear in a more or less veiled way throughout the narrative, offering, ultimately, a highly personal statement on how to achieve spiritual fulfilment (how to reach the top of the mountain), and how to integrate the potential of the imagination into our journey through life. Daumal wrote this novel in tragic circumstances, in the intermittent periods of lucidity that his terminal state as a tuberculosis patient allowed him, until his death at only 36. It is understandable that spirituality and imagination should become a lifeline when hope is extinguished.

There are obvious affinities between everything surrounding a rare novel and beautiful, radical discourse like Mount Analogue and Charris’s universe, constructed on the imaginaries of adventure, missions, frontiers and unexplored worlds. For the painter, as for Daumal, imagination ends up being the best option for moving forward. In the face of despair, fleeing to Mount Analogue; in the face of uncertainty, giving free rein to the imagination, to the possibility of other worlds bordering on the absurd, on visions and prophecy.

Imagination is the substance of Charris’s language. The French mythologist Gilbert Durand made a whole series of approaches to the importance of the imagination as an epistemological method, leaving us reference works for the analysis of visual culture such as L’Imagination symbolique (1964). Durand refers to the imagination as a mental faculty exclusive to humans, a space of freedom and reverie that enables us to create what does not yet exist. But it is also a domain of rebellion against determinism, particularly in Western societies, where imagination goes hand in hand with iconoclasm. The individual imagination (disconnected from the imaginary, which is a collective, shared construction) is an irreducible creative power that makes it possible to speculate beyond geographical and cultural limits, beyond the boundaries of the possible. Charris inhabits those limits, those thresholds. Could that upright figure looking directly and fearlessly at the head of the monster in the painting El cruce del umbral [Crossing the Threshold] be the painter himself? This picture can be interpreted as that enclave where Charris is conceptually situated in Futurama; it is a threshold, a place between doubt and certainty, between the present and the future, a boundary between the possible and pure flights of fancy. 

There is a hint of heroism in El cruce del umbral. According to the archetypes of the imaginary (so well spelt out by Durand himself with the approval of his teacher Jung), that character who confronts Frankenstein could represent the hero reaching a crucial point on his path. Campbell’s hero with a thousand faces reverberates in this painting, in his upright pose under the edge of the flash of lightning. But the contemporary hero, the hero of today, displays certain shades of colour shaped by the light cast by dystopia: nowadays — when resistance is controlled dissidence, when the struggle against an all-powerful system seems doomed to failure — the hero becomes a product of fanciful imagination, unreal in his chances of succeeding, all too real in his psychology. Is he a disillusioned hero? Is he tired? What is he thinking when he looks into the eyes of this creature born of Universal Studies in the 1930s? Does his backpack weigh him down?

Charris regales us with more contemporary heroic visions in Futurama; one of them is Maternidad [Maternity], that woman carrying the child on her back and wearing sports clothes, slogging her way up a mountain, an interesting view of the role of women as mothers today, who have to be skilful, strong, energetic, capable, confident and fit, must not succumb to vices and bad habits, have to be intellectually and sexually active, and also competent, fair and clever... Simply exhausting. This present-future mother refutes and updates the traditional representations of motherhood in art and returns us a diagnosis as accurate as it is worrying. Women become heroines again in one of the paintings that — in my view — best distil the spirit exuded by Futurama as a whole. They are Las estoicas [The Stoic Women]. They and their dogs, that is, women 

in alliance with nature, advance towards the eye of the hurricane, straight into the tornado: they have no fear. In this painting the destruction of the paradigm, the end of the cycle, becomes obvious. But — and here we apply a feminist interpretation of the image — the women move forward and do not stop; they face the risk and whatever lies ahead.

The dogs beside the stoic women are a symbol of a dark concern on the painter’s part which appears in various works and is at the same time the light at the end of the tunnel: it is the relationship with nature, tainted and at a critical point (as the big-headed red octopus reminded us, emerging from the waters with its sardonic smile), but also the final utopia and the only way out for spiritual expansion. This is the view that Charris captures in El reino pacífico [The Peaceful Kingdom], an idyllic picture in which animals and children chat in harmony. The painting is based on one of the few encouraging prophecies that ancient writings have to offer, namely the one contained in verse 6 of chapter 11 of the Book of Isaiah in the Bible, when it says: “The wolf will live with the lamb, the leopard will lie down with the goat, the calf and the lion and the yearling together; and a little child will lead them.” It is an optimistic, heartwarming vision with Judeo-Christian roots (how our ingrained culture gives us away!) which counteracts the pessimistically inclined speculations that Charris has been painting here and there. At last a positive prophecy in which humans come to an agreement with nature. The mountaineers have reached the place they wanted to get to.

Everything is about to come to an end and it is now that the journey must begin. We take our expeditionary paraphernalia and enter the wilderness of doubt to climb the slopes of imagination towards its summits, where we do not know what future awaits us. Like the hikers in Boomerpunk (after Enid Blyton) we look at the mountain and stand on the threshold of doubt: do we climb it or not? Will it go well for us up there? Will we arrive safe and sound? Will we be able to get to the top and come back down? This arduous exercise in imaginative mountaineering is what Charris proposes with Futurama: a determination to continue moving forward as a process of exploration and reflection. The view from the summits will allow us to take a breath of pure perspective which will transform our way of understanding the present and the future. Because otherwise, what is the point of climbing a mountain that does not exist?

Alpinism is the art of climbing mountains by confronting the greatest dangers with the greatest prudence. You cannot always stay on the summits. You have to come down again. So what’s the point? Only this: what is above knows what is below, what is below does not know what is above. While climbing, take note of all the difficulties along your path; while you are ascending you can see them. During the descent you will no longer see them, but you will know that they are there if you have observed carefully. 

René 

René Daumal