Liminal Realities:

Imagination is real; the tangible is not the only reality.

This idea, central to Jungian thought, resonates with a growing tendency in contemporary figurative art towards myth, animism, and primordial symbolism. In this age of rationalism and materialism, these works offer a return to a world of symbols, archetypes, and interiority.

Artists such as Sophie Wake and Hugo Winder-Lind make paintings that bridge outward-facing modern consciousness with the timeless imaginary realm.

Their work suggests a profound shift towards the roots of imagination.

Carl Jung, the Swiss psychiatrist and pioneer

of analytical psychology, regarded imagination as the highest faculty of the psyche, imbued with the ability

to heal and reconcile the conscious and unconscious. His method of active imagination, in which one engages with inner figures and images as living presences, demonstrates this view.

Imagination long predates written language or organized religion.

The 30,000 year old Paleolithic cave paintings in Lascaux and Chauvet are among humanity’s earliest expressions in this capacity.

Early humans retreated into the darkness of the cave to paint animals, human figures, and hybrid human-animal forms.

These images bound the physical world and the invisible realms of the imagination, the unconscious, the divine; the cave itself might represent a womb-like threshold between these.

Picasso is said to have remarked after visiting Lascaux,

“We have invented nothing.”

Yuval Noah Harari, a historian and philosopher known for exploring the evolution of human culture and consciousness, posits that humans constantly live inside and uphold a structure of myths.  Jung made a similar claim, that myths are structures of the psyche, shaping both individual and collective life. The resurgence of mythic and animistic imagery in contemporary art is therefore profound.

Wake’s use of flattened forms and non-representational colour recalls folk traditions, yet the effect is neither naïve nor ironic.

Its simplicity echoes the symbolic directness of prehistoric paintings, and speaks in a language older than reason.

Wangechi Mutu, the acclaimed Kenyan-American artist whose hybrid figures have become iconic

in contemporary art, extends

this animistic consciousness into the realm

of the hybrid body.

Her mythic, part-human, part-animal figures,

such as those in History Trolling (2014), collapse boundaries between species, technology, and spirit.

Wangechi Mutu,

'History Trolling', 2014,

Collage painting on vinyl.

Mutu’s beings feel like archetypes breaking through the surface of contemporary identity, at once ancestral, futuristic, and cosmic.

In Jungian terms, her hybrids function as living symbols of instinct, shadow, and the divine feminine, revealing that the psyche’s primal energies

remain alive and potent beneath

modernity’s veneer.

Taken together, these artists demonstrate that animal

and hybrid forms are not decorative motifs

but carriers of primordial knowledge.

They summon a symbolic language that predates rationality, reminding us

that imagination is one of humanity’s oldest modes of meaning-making.

These paintings feel ancient because they are, psychically.

Jung spoke of timeless patterns that underlie consciousness. They persist through cultural evolution, resurfacing in times of upheaval or transition.

The return to animistic imagery is an atavistic recollection of the mythic foundations of the mind.

His human and animal figures emerge with earthy palettes and raw mark-making.

His compositions evoke primitive, cosmological scenes in which all beings share a common aliveness.

Among the animal forms that appear in both Wake and Winder-Lind’s work, the horse stands out with an archetypal force.

Both artists seem attuned to this potency.

Wake’s horses, though often playful, have a definite gravity.

Winder-Lind casts the horse in apocalyptic and cosmogonic frames: A Horse at the Beginning of the World and Horses at the End of the World

name them as witnesses to creation

and collapse.

In both artists’ work, such as Winder-Lind’s Horse Father the Emperor or Wake’s Peace Warrior, warrior-like riders sometimes appear, evoking the hero archetype or the apocalyptic horsemen of Revelation.

Here, the horse is an ethereal vehicle, carrying the human through chaos, death, and rebirth.

If the Age of Enlightenment reflects

the Apollonian archetype of progress and light, these artists propose a counter-myth that restores interiority, intuition, and symbolic life.

By animating primordial archetypes, they reconnect us with the deep structures of psyche and cosmos.

They affirm that imagination is reality’s true foundation.

These paintings of an animal form summon a living symbol that connects us to the whole, to truth.

 © perediza 2026