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Michael Page’s Elan Vital Series Is A Morphogenisis Of Color, Consciousness, and Life

Looking at Michael Page‘s flowing paintings makes me wish he would paint a tsunami and it envelop me in it’s juicy swirling electrical colors. Here is a preview of his upcoming exhibition Élan Vital at White Walls in San Francisco. The meaning of the series title, Elan Vital, explains the morphing electric imagery seen in the artwork:

Élan vital was coined by French philosopher Henri Bergson in his 1907 book Creative Evolution, in which he addresses the question of self-organisation and spontaneous morphogenesis of things in an increasingly complex manner. Elan vital was translated in the English edition as “vital impetus”, but is usually translated by his detractors as “vital force”. It is a hypothetical explanation for evolution and development of organisms, which Bergson linked closely with consciousness.

It was believed by others that this essence (élan vital) could be harvested and embedded into an inanimate substance and activated with electricity, perhaps taking literally another of Bergson’s metaphorical descriptions, the “current of life”.

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