Anto Carte

Private collection, Brussels;

Private collection, France.

Probably dated before 1918 based on its pictorial facture, The Mystic attests to Anto Carte’s profound interest in Christian culture. Described as a ‘custodian of Symbolism’, the artist adopted an anti-modern stance, claiming continuity with his predecessors. For him, Symbolism and Catholicism were not at odds, but were harmoniously interwoven.

Figures of the blind man and the sower of seeds, recurrent in his oeuvre, refer explicitly to parables in the Gospels and reflect a spiritual interpretation of daily life. The mystical, for Anto Carte, goes beyond simple religiosity: it embodies a quest for meaning, an internal high-mindedness in the face of a changing world.

In Symbolist tradition, the visible becomes for him a way of accessing the invisible. Running counter to the avant-gardes, he opposed faithfulness to the sacred, to memory and to humans. The mystical becomes a refuge, a power of unity in a fragmented universe.

Here as elsewhere, this mystical dimension is embodied in a human figure imbued with dignity, interiority and compassion – an image of the divine, but also of human aspiration towards the absolute.