“Each painting is its own unique drama and reminds us that the past and present fuse together as we gain knowledge in our own journey.” — Susan Lizotte

Susan Lizotte’s Oracular Neo-Medievalism

“Tarot and dreams are two dialects in the language of the soul,” writes noted tarotist Philippe St. Genoux — but to that we ought to add a third, more powerful dialect: art. In its most expansive forms, art contains both dreams and divination, along with humanity’s innumerable further facets of mystery, time, psyche, soul, and experience. Art helps us navigate our fear of the unknown, find our place in the world, bring order to the chaotic and invisible forces of nature, and give a shape to history and meaning to life events. Arguably, so does Tarot. So when a contemporary Neo-Medievalist painter like Susan Lizotte wanted a visual framework to express our fraught relationship to the volatile, conflicted, violent, promising, menacing, magical times we are currently living through, the iconic 1491 Sola Busca tarot — a deck initially commissioned as a work of art whose legend has only grown over the centuries — caught her attention.

The Fool’s Journey series speaks to Lizotte’s cultural revisitation in form and narrative, first and foremost by grounding its aesthetic in the corresponding art historical one. The idea — one that has inspired Lizotte’s work for years — is that we live in a time with echoes of the Middle Ages in our wars and disease, power struggles and ignorance, scientific advances and artistic innovations; why not therefore make art that channels that energy in its style as it seeks to message its subject matter. In her previous series, Lizotte has explored ancient maps of war and plague in Europe, legends of ocean-going princely crusaders, and the sacred architecture of worship and of science. In her new tarot-based paintings, Lizotte harnesses this same visual language, for consistent reasons, to explore her motif with the most personal, emotional, relatable storylines to date — our own.

These cards follow the spiritual travels from the innocent state of The Fool to the knowing attainment of The World; this is also the story of humanity's evolution toward enlightenment. But crucially, it further forms the armature for an individual’s own unique path toward their destiny and their truest self. Heady material for what started out as a card game, but the perfect subject matter for art to take on. Tarot — like art — has the power to communicate multiple stories and meanings, even paradoxical ones, simultaneously; both are also malleable to the circumstances of context. Cards convey meaning in large part through the other ones around them and their own physical placement and orientation, just like the effect of curation on paintings. To add to the arcane adventure, cards have counterintuitive meanings — Death might foretell not an ending but a new beginning, the Fool might be the holiest soul, the Philosopher might be getting into trouble with alchemy; the Hanged Man, however, is almost always less than ideal.

The Sola Busca is a brilliant partner for Lizotte in this historical engagement — with its colorful procession of Greco-Roman characters, 15th-century armor and robes, musical instruments, flags, shields, torches and menagerie of symbolic creatures of the land, sea, and air, as well as its penchant for bright, eccentric color-blocking and stylized anatomy reminiscent of painters like Masaccio, Mantegna, Piero della Francesca, and Filippo Lippi. She shares their love for figures of noble yet brutish physiognomy and frieze-like bearing, their romantic and idyllic or perhaps wasted landscapes, motifs of royalty, religion, philosophy, and war — all inflected with the quasi-feral noirish folklore of the Medieval times at the cusp of the Renaissance. Lizotte is right, there’s a lot about the dawn of the 16th century that reminds us of today.

To the degree that much of the series’ power comes from her overt aesthetic engagement, all of this is particularly suited to Lizotte’s established style of muscular allegorical narrative scenes, to her maps of disease and dragon-slaying, archetypes and legends, sea creatures and oracles, temple architecture and wild meadows, as well as her aesthetic of chunky, sensual, gestural, and schematic figures rife with geopolitical undertones. But perhaps what distinguishes Lizotte from her art historical ancestors, is her embrace of the heroic individual story as a synecdoche for humanity’s universal, ever-present struggles. Each painting — each card — performs its role in our own uniquely encoded passion plays, intended to guide our individual journeys, remaining sensitive to intuition, and aware that no matter the magic, the ultimate answers are always already inside each of us, if we know how to look for them.

— Shana Nys Dambrot

Los Angeles, 2023

The Fool’s Journey is a tarot card painting series based on the Sola Busca deck, which is the earliest illustrated complete tarot card deck made in 1491. Initially used as a card game called Tarocchi, tarot has evolved over the years into a divination tool. Tarot is ingenious for the ability to convey manifold meanings ascribed to each card and also convey alternative meanings if the card is presented to the viewer right side up or up side down. The cards have different meanings depending on which cards surround them. The Fool is the first and unnumbered card in the deck, the Fool represents the metaphor for our life journey and all of the stages of life with its hazards and pains, as well as the growth and development from birth/innocence into a fully realized spiritual and physical being. Each painting is its own unique drama and reminds us that the past and present fuse together as we gain knowledge in our own journey. Looking to the metaphysical to find our place in the universe is an invitation with tarot cards into a game of high imagination to try and decode secret meanings and make new self discoveries.

— Susan Lizotte