Radiant Painting, Radiant Matter and Radiant Energy: Science and Paranoscience

Abstract

The article examines Mikhail Larionov’s Rayonism in the context of a wide range of scientific and pseudoscientific ideas about radiant matter, radiation and invisible fluids. Rayonism is one of the first pictorial movements within the framework of which the task was set to visualize scientific knowledge about the invisible: radiation, X-rays, radioactive, ultraviolet, and infrared rays, and the rays of thought. Numerous interactions or direct intersections of Larionov’s texts with the ideas of radiant matter that were widespread in the culture of his time give reason to consider the invention of Rayonism not as an extravagant gesture provoking and shocking the public but as a conscious attempt to synthesize ideas scattered in the atmosphere of those years, as an attempt to clothe the current problems of his time in a new ‘stylistic’ unity. At the beginning of the 20th century, the spread of scientific, occult, theosophical, and simply fantastic ideas related to invisible radiation, radiant matter and the rays of thought was indeed so widespread that it could lead to thoughts about the creation of a ‘ray style’, about the emergence of a new formative ‘artistic will’.

Keywords

• mikhail larionov
• rayonism
• radiant matter
• non-objective painting
• science and the avant-garde
• iconography of the invisible