Gateways to Mystic States of Consciousness. The Case of Luigi Pericle and the genius loci of Ascona

Gateways to Mystic States of Consciousness. The Case of Luigi Pericle and the genius loci of Ascona

A special focus will be devoted to the work and thought of Luigi Pericle (Basel, 1916-Ascona, 2001), illustrator, writer, scholar of Theosophy and of esoteric doctrines, and above all painter, was an artist completely outside the canons, and artistic currents of the 20th century. At the peak of his career, after 1965, he decided to withdraw from the art system, to give up society life and to devote himself solely to artistic research and to esoteric studies, retiring to his house in Ascona, on Monte Verità. In voluntary hermitage, he died at the beginning of the new millennium, but for recent years now his work has been rediscovered enthusiastically by critics and by the general public.
On his arrival in Ascona in the early 1950s, Luigi Pericle entered the thick of the artistic and cultural scene which emerged between 1950 and 1970 in Ascona and Locarno. Here artists of international renown mingled and experimented in an extraordinary period of collaboration and exchange, their individual poetics revealing that they were profoundly rooted in the historical and anthropological fabric of the utopian experience of Monte Verità. They was all fascinated by the genius loci of the area. The origins and creation of Monte Verità, a hub for theosophists and avant-garde thinkers, and the birth of the Eranos cultural centre reverberated throughout the twentieth century.