Henri Michaux’s Inner Journey

The inner journey lies behind Henri Michaux’s works, which include watercolour portraits, ideograms and poems. Michaux explored different mental states (such as those produced by a few days’ solitary confinement or the taking of psychotropic drugs) to see what arose from his inner vision. Isolated from his surroundings, his hand automatically painted hallucinated faces that look at us from another world and signs that only he understood: evidence of obsessive states and moments of truce with external reality. What kind of ideograms would we make today?