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VISIONARISM
Visionarism
2018–2024
Visionarism is an imaginary avant-garde rooted in an unrealized 20th-century ideal: the belief that art can be a vehicle for inner elevation, ethical clarity, and aesthetic sovereignty. Inspired by the writings of Gérard de Lacaze-Duthiers (1909) and revived through Krochmalny’s fictional reconstruction, Visionarism proposes a world where geometry thinks, silence speaks, and form reveals truth.
This is not a return to the past, but a vision of what art could have become — and might still become. Each painting is a synthesis of abstraction and ethics, offering a serene yet radical alternative to irony, spectacle, and nihilism. Visionarism does not depict reality — it transfigures it.
Principles of Visionarism
Aesthetic awareness, lucid thinking
Visionarist art is born from an awakened consciousness: to perceive is to think, and to think clearly is to create beauty. These images do not seek to confuse but to refine perception.
Ordered, abstract, contemplative
These paintings do not shout — they breathe. Composed with precision, each form is a decision. The language is abstract, but the experience is concrete: active contemplation.
To elevate perception, to harmonize form and life
Visionarism proposes a different way of inhabiting the world. Form does not embellish life — it sharpens it, orders it, makes it sensitive. Art does not represent existence, it rebalances it.
Individualist ethics, aesthetic emancipation
Without moralism or slogans, Visionarism affirms an ethic based on inner freedom. The work does not impose meaning — it activates it. To see is to free oneself from the given.
Origins of Visionarism: Art as Inner Nobility
The word Visionarism did not emerge from nowhere. It was born in the early 20th century, within the poetic and philosophical movement led by Gérard de Lacaze-Duthiers and the Groupe d’Action d’Art. These self-declared Aristocrats and Visionaries rejected all external authorities — religion, law, politics — and claimed the right to live and create "in beauty."
They did not seek elitism, but an aesthetic individualism based on conscience, inner cultivation, and a synthesis of emotion and thought. As André Colomer wrote, "to have vision is much more than to see — it is to see as one feels, with the full education of the senses and of the mind."
Their aesthetic was not decorative, but ethical. Their poetry, described as “frescoes of spiritual life,” aimed to express the living nuance of existence itself. This visionary impulse — radical, lucid, emancipatory — is what Visionarism now revives in visual form, through painting.
Bibliography of Visionarism
1. Foundational Texts of the Visionary Movement and the "Aristocracy"
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Gérard de Lacaze-Duthiers, L’Idéal humain de l’art. Essai d’esthétique libertaire. Paris: Fischbacher, 1906.
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Gérard de Lacaze-Duthiers, La Découverte de la Vie. Paris: Fischbacher, 1907.
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Gérard de Lacaze-Duthiers, Le Culte de l’Idéal ou l’Aristocratie. Paris: Alcan, 1909.
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Gérard de Lacaze-Duthiers, La Liberté de la Pensée. Paris: Bibliothèque de Philosophie Contemporaine, 1911.
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Gérard de Lacaze-Duthiers, Vers l’Artistocrate. Paris: Crès, 1921.
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André Colomer, contributions in Le Rythme, Actes des Poètes, La Forge, and L’Action d’Art (1908–1914).
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Roger Dévigne (Georges-Hector Mai), Les Bâtisseurs de Villes. Paris: Bibliothèque-Charpentier, 1911.
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Banville d’Hostel, Le Semeur de Sable. Paris: Messein, 1912.
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Bernard Marcotte, Poèmes pessimistes (unpublished manuscript cited by Florian Parmentier).
2. Secondary Sources and Critical Studies
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Florian Parmentier, La Littérature à l’époque. Histoire de la littérature française de 1885 à nos jours. Paris: Perrin, 1914.
(pp. 224–231: key overview of the Visionary movement, its relation to Bergsonian intuitionism, and the codified free verse). -
Michel Ragon, Histoire de l’anarchisme dans les lettres. Paris: Complexe, 1974.
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Jean Maitron (dir.), Dictionnaire biographique du mouvement ouvrier français. Éditions de l’Atelier.
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Paul Bénichou, Le Temps des prophètes: doctrine de l'âge romantique. Paris: Gallimard, 1977.
3. Contemporary Documents (Related to Syd Krochmalny's Work)
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Syd Krochmalny, Visionarism. New York/Berlin, 2024.
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Syd Krochmalny, Parallel Avant-Gardes: Counterfactual Strategies in Contemporary Art. In preparation.
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The Visionary Manifesto (1906), adapted and reimagined by Syd Krochmalny.
Exhibitions
PARALLEL AVANT-GARDES
The Slip
New York, August-October, 2024
Press & Essays
VANGUARDIAS ACCIDENTALES
María Raya Contreras
25 sept 2024
Jennifer
PARALLEL VANGUARDS
Syd Krochmalny
8 feb 2025
Jennifer
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