When you spread out a Tarot deck before you, your eyes are dazzled by the abundance of images and possibilities. Every colorful image has a meaning; each one carries messages for your future—some good, full of hope; some bad, some comforting, some unsettling, some incomprehensible, or even downright crazy. What’s more—the images are your intimate reflections, so secret and personal that you’re afraid to look at them. It’s best to keep these images hidden away in the attic, like Dorian Gray’s portrait.

 

Tarot is a colorful multiverse and a picture book for adults, where the images are constantly shifting; it is a film with countless scenarios in unpredictable genres. Taro archetypes possess a wide range of emotions—there are happy images in whose company you would want to live forever, such as the Sun, the World, or the Lovers.

There are images like the Tower or the Three of Swords, which you would want to avoid just as heartache and depression. There are images that are neither one thing nor the other, like days that end as soon as they begin. Sometimes no rational meaning can be found in the arrangements of images, and this lends additional depth to the constellations of paintings. “The Tarot of Invisible Longing” spins like a carousel before the eyes, leaving the viewer in a state of confusion and intoxication.

 

When I discovered the world of Tarot—a marginal, suspicion-laden universe of images where human existence is explained through a system of visual symbols—I longed to paint my own Tarot paintings. The series of paintings is currently halfway done; when it is finished, the carousel will spin even faster.

We explore the world with the help of letters, numbers, and data. No one dares to argue against rationality anymore. Yet on the fringes of this world, boxes of colorful images lie quietly hidden—Tarot decks, where the lost seek refuge and clarity. Those who have been worn down to the bone by logic, practicality, correct belief, and correct behavior. If people need comfort, why not seek it in the arrangements of these vivid images?

 

I’ve conducted a small micro-study, compiling questions that people would like to ask a fortune-teller. These would be existential, deeply personal questions that we’d be too shy to share with friends, therapists, or siblings: When will I die? Will we manage to stay together for the rest of our lives? Will I recover? Will I become a famous musician? You can ask the images without feeling any discomfort about yourself, the questioner, or those who answer—the gatekeepers of the subconscious.