The artwork titled “The eye like a strange balloon goes to infinity” was created by Odilon Redon in 1882. This piece is executed in the medium of lithography on paper, and it measures 26.2 by 19.8 cm. As part of the Symbolism art movement, it belongs to the series “To Edgar Poe” and is a symbolic painting. The Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) in Los Angeles, California, United States, is the current custodian of this piece.
The artwork presents a haunting and enigmatic visual with a central motif resembling an eye that transforms into a balloon-like figure, soaring towards an undefined and limitless space. Below this central figure is the dark horizon line of a landscape, perhaps suggesting the bounds of earthly reality juxtaposed against the eye’s transcendent ascent. The scene is rendered in a soft and somewhat ethereal monochromatic palette, characteristic of Redon’s work during this period. The ephemeral nature of the subject ties well with the Symbolist movement, which often valued the evocative and the suggestive over the literal or the naturalistic. The theme of the balloon as an eye invokes ideas of vision, perception, and the soul’s journey, possibly reflecting on the works of Edgar Allan Poe, which frequently dealt with similar themes of the unknown and the unknowable.
