"Oaths to the Unknown" at KSAR Living

This summer, KSAR Living Ibiza presents Oaths to the Unknown — a curated selection from the private collection of artist and collector Paul Graves, opening June 22, 2026.

The exhibition is built around a compelling idea: the mantic stain — a term coined by artist and occultist Ithell Colquhoun to describe marks made through chance-driven techniques, where forms emerge not as planned images but as revelations stirred from the unconscious.

Rooted in mediumistic practice and championed by the Surrealists, these works operate as instruments of visual alchemy — transforming materials into enigmatic wonders and inviting viewers into deeper, altered modes of perception.

Two artists anchor the show.

Louise Janin (1893–1997) spent decades developing her signature cosmograms — marbled works on paper in which oil-based and water-based pigments are manipulated directly on the surface, releasing forms through chance as much as intention.

The results hover between the cosmic and the intimate: metamorphic shapes suggest plants, landscapes, and flowers without ever fully settling into literal description. Twenty original cosmograms are on view, spanning the breadth of her long exploration.

James Lee Byars (1932–1997) approached art as ceremony. Shaped by years in Japan, Noh theatre, and Shinto ritual, his practice moved between stillness and spectacle — always circling the question rather than the answer.

For this exhibition, KSAR Living presents unpublished documentary photographs from his landmark 1968 live broadcast The World Question Center, in which a circle of intellectuals including John Cage, Joseph Beuys, and Marcel Broodthaers were invited to offer questions rather than answers. The discomfort, the hesitation, the intimacy that followed became the work itself.

Together, these two bodies of work propose that the medium and the automatist are not footnotes in art history — but enduring presences whose vision can disrupt, heal, and reawaken our enchantment with the world.

CAN Local is an initiative by CAN Art Fair Ibiza designed to highlight the cultural, artistic and exhibition projects taking place across the island during the fair, helping to connect and strengthen Ibiza’s cultural ecosystem. The promotion of the CAN Local program is supported by Ocean Drive Talamanca.