CSM Mental Imagery Projects

Symvisio As an Example of Mental Imagery Unfolding in Time and Space

The idea of a symvisio came to me on a beach in Aptos, California. A boat surfed from my left to right as I watched the waves. To follow it, I had to turn my head. Suddenly, I saw five consecutive paintings of the boat combined into one picture that told me what the boat did. I realized I could incorporate the element of time into the paintings while reaching for a greater variety and more profound unity. That led to the idea of symvisio, a name that I made up and trademarked. “Symvisio I: The Spiritual Dance of Form and Color” was my first attempt at it. So far, I have completed thirteen symvisios.

In my pursuit of art and science, I have been bewitched by the concepts of time and space. My attempt to scientifically understand them led me to the Theory of Relativity, which taught me that "real-time" and "real space" are two aspects of a single entity, so-called "space-time." In art, I have been fascinated by four entities—real and virtual time and real and virtual space—and how those entities mix. In music, film, theatre, and literature, real time plays a dominant role in virtual time and space presentation. How these artworks unfold in real time affects the audience's emotions and lengthens the duration of their enjoyment. In painting, however, the real-time's role is relatively minor. My compositional invention of Symvisio is an attempt to remedy this shortcoming.

About twenty-four years ago, I created a multi-panel format of 2-dimensional art, which I have called "symvisio," a word that I made up from the Latin roots "sym" and "visio" to mean "viewing together." In this format, the synergistic relationships between the panels strongly affect the dynamics of the presentation of each panel and that of the composition. Since its inception, I have been preoccupied with exploring the potentialities hidden in the composition of symvisio.

For example, recent studies in neuropsychology show that perception of visual and/or tactile texture significantly affects positive and negative emotions. That is one reason, we are told, that when children are sad, they reach for their teddy bear or soft blanket; the positive emotions evoked by the softness of the teddy bears soothe them. Hence, for twenty-four years, I have examined how various compositional elements, such as texture, color, and form, create mental images that invoke specific emotions—more on this in the CSM 2023 Summer seminar.

Mohsen Janatpour, 6/11/23