The Mental Imagery of Adrian Ionita

by Adrian Silvan Ionescu Ph.D.

An artist with many resources in the field of the visual arts, Adrian Ionita chose for
the upcoming Around the Coyote Art Festival a surprisingly new and original genre of
artistic expression: the hypnagogic drawing.2
Living in a complete dark room in a sensory deprivation experiment, at the threshold
between reality and dream, he makes drawings of mental images. “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. Hunting images
seen with the mind’s eye 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
consciousness. Many of his drawings are a chaotic overlapping of mental tracings3
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. 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 Idea, 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 extractions4 of ideas developed on the mind’s
screen, a reflection of the thought in action. Most of them were hypnopompic
drawings, drawings done in the morning, when our mental mood - just escaped from
the vivid exercise of our last dream - 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 drawings . With many of his ambitious projects,
Adrian Ionita identifies itself with a new avant-garde 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, is an art critic and teacher at the Nicolae Grigorescu
Institute of Fine Arts from Bucharest Romania. He traveled extensively throughout
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. 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.
3. 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 image leaves the mental screen. This
way they can be printed or played back as a short animation.
4. 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.

Published in "Cronica Romana", August 2002, Bucharest, Romania