Dragons, court fools, valiant knights and mythical creatures taken out of the familiar context of stern woodcuts and dour prints, instead transported to a realm of vibrant colors and amorphous liquid vistas all populate the work of designer and magus Alicia Sales, working under the “hyper-persona” Friday Trismegistus. This weekend you are invited to voyage into Trismegistus’ aesthetic fiefdom, and experience their alchemical art firsthand.
The exhibition Do What Thou Wilt, at Framework Craft Coffee House’s Chained Gallery, takes the timestream-sipping nature of vaporwave’s graphic aesthetic but travels much further back than, say, Miami in the 1980s. More Merlin than Max Headroom. Trismegistus’ prints take the iconography and illustration style of medieval art and plunges it into a surrealist phantasmagoria of vivid colors and lights.
Trismegistus’ interest in medieval art is no mere dabbling; they are a serious student.
“I’ve been working with medieval imagery for almost a decade, but my drawings manifested during lockdown. During this time, I felt like a monk and poured through art archives of illuminated manuscripts and incunabula, and spent hours upon hours out of my unemployed days copying images to mimic their style as a way to develop my own,” they explain. “I like the flat and distorted proportions, absurd mixed creatures, and dreamlike imagery from these texts.” Trismegistus cites medieval and mystical texts like Splendor Solis, The Drolatic Dreams of Pantagruel, Hieronymus Bosch and Pieter Bruegel the Elder as some of the influences.
Trismegistus, a graphic designer by trade with a background in painting and printmaking, has developed an artistic practice that takes modern design tools like Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop and applies these to classical forms and scenes … and then transports them into a Technicolor fever-dreamland.
“Digital art is wonderful and I love to really lean into it as an art form without emulating analog methods,” says Trismegistus. “Most of these figures were drawn by hand with an ink pen, then scanned and processed into my programs. ‘Sphynx 2’ and ‘Monk’ are actual paintings done with crayon and watercolor paint. ‘Jester 1’ is entirely vector.”
The highlights are many. Archival pigment prints “Lyre” and “Flute” feature the same whimsical hooded creature, plucking a lyre and playing a flute against a background of bold red hues. “Fool” features a two-headed jester clutching a flower and a knife, suspended in a frame that looks like old PowerPoint slides. “Knight 1” and “Knight 2” take the heroic archetype and transforms it into a almost Charlie Brown/Bosch pastiche, using thick marker lines and diminutive stature. The watercolor “Sphynx 2” presents a celestial human-animal hybrid that quite literally contains the sun and stars within its chest. “Demon 1” is a digital and hand-illustrated hybrid, a surrealist dragon clutching a scythe and waving off gleaming orbs.
Creating something new and precious from familiar elements and techniques all befit Trismegistus’ interest in alchemy and applying the underlying principles of that mysterious craft to their art.
“Alchemical artwork is deeply symbolic and encoded within the images are processes of significant change, signifying both material change in the outer world and spiritual change within,” says Trismegistus. “My work isn’t alchemical because I appropriate symbols and drawing styles, it is alchemical through my efforts of making the internal external and using the imagery that emerges from that process as a language.”
Though the title of the exhibition is an Aleister Crowley reference (“Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law”), Trismegistus has no real connection to that diabolical mage, beyond a similar impulse for explorations without boundary.
“Everything I do, I do for love and for fun, and through that I have been able to know myself better and connect with others on a deeper level. My magick is different, more psychological, and wholly my own,” says Trismegistus. “[However] I like that it feels like a call to action.”
Their work is at the intersection of the material and the divine, Hermetic philosophies, Jungian theory, early surrealists, leavening wisdom with compassion, finding balance in contrasts and how communities formed in pre-industrial Europe. This is not chaos magic, but creating new utopias.
“I believe Alicia Sales is a phenomenal artist who has truly tapped into the ether,” says Chained Gallery curator Sapphire Servellon. “Alicia’s work in Do What Thou Wilt offers a playful yet profound take on modern-day alchemic practice. … [They are] undeniably someone to watch as they continue to shape the local arts scene.”
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This article appears in Dec 4-10, 2024.