The Return of Imagination: Fantasy as Contemporary Thought

10/22/2025

THE RETURN OF IMAGINATION: FANTASY AS CONTEMPORARY THOUGHT

For much of the 20th century, art that strayed from visible reality was relegated to the margins. In the dominant discourse, the “fantastic” was associated with the minor, the escapist, or the childish. Modernity championed abstraction, critique, gesture, and concept. Imagination—understood as a symbolic, poetic, and emotional territory—was pushed to the periphery, almost as if it were a visual sin in a world that aspired to be rational and analytical.

But things have changed. And perhaps this change says more about us than about art.

Today, fantastic art is experiencing a resurgence driven not by nostalgia, but by necessity. In a present dominated by technology, hyper-connectivity, and the overexposure of images, fantasy has become a tool of cultural resistance. It does not seek to evade reality, but to reimagine it, reinterpret it, and, in many cases, heal it.

THE RETURN OF THE SYMBOLIC

Contemporary art seems to have rediscovered that the symbol remains one of the most powerful forms of knowledge. What fantasy proposes is not an escape from the world, but a parallel reading of it. Through the mythological, the dreamlike, or the allegorical, today’s artists address deeply current themes: the crisis of identity, the loss of reference points, the impact of the digital on the human, the fragility of the body, and the desire for transcendence.

In this context, fantasy becomes a philosophical language. Its images seek not only to dazzle but to awaken thought. In an era when everything seems to have been said, the fantastic reminds us that there are still things that can only be expressed through metaphor, suggestion, or dream.

FROM SURREALISM TO THE HYBRID PRESENT

If historical Surrealism used dreams as a pathway to the unconscious, contemporary fantastic art speaks of something different: a world where the boundaries between the real and the imaginary have dissolved. We live in a “post-oneiric” era: the images of reality and those of desire constantly mix on our screens, in video games, in artificial intelligence, in the aesthetics of social media. The dream no longer opposes wakefulness; it is part of it.

Contemporary artists—painters, sculptors, and illustrators—move freely in this hybrid terrain. Their works, like those presented in exhibitions such as Figurative Fantasy, construct personal universes. The influence of ancient myths merges with popular iconography, comics, film, or video games, generating a new kind of symbolic figuration.

THE POWER OF THE SLOW IMAGE

In a world saturated with stimuli, fantastic art forces us to pause. Against the speed of the ephemeral, fantasy proposes the experience of attentive looking. Each work, no matter how virtuosic or exuberant, contains a call to slowness. Contemplating these images is an act of pause, a small ritual of observation.

That is why its rise should not surprise us: the contemporary audience seeks to feel wonder again—a wonder that comes not from the spectacular but from the poetic. Fantasy returns to us that primary emotion of looking and discovering something we did not know we carried within.

IMAGINATION AS RESISTANCE

If anything defines today’s fantastic art, it is its value as resistance. In a culture dominated by the literal, imagining becomes a political act. Against cynicism or information overload, imagination offers another form of truth: an emotional, symbolic, and open truth.

This is perhaps its most beautiful paradox: fantastic art does not flee from the present but inhabits it from another angle. It speaks to us of the invisible, but not of the nonexistent. It reminds us that the unreal also has weight, and that fantasy, far from distancing us from the world, can help us understand it better.

THE FUTURE WILL BE IMAGINED

The rise of fantastic art in galleries, fairs, and private collections confirms that imagination has regained its place in contemporary art. New artists are not afraid to mix beauty and mystery, technique and emotion, classicism and avant-garde. Their works do not seek to explain the world, but to open it. They offer us visions that expand the boundaries of the possible, returning to art its magical, ritual, and emotional dimension.

Perhaps the future of art depends not only on formal innovation but also on daring to dream with meaning—to look inward as much as outward, to make visible once more that which cannot be said with words.

Fantasy, once again, is not escapism: it is a way of looking at the world with depth. And that, without a doubt, is one of the most contemporary gestures that art can offer us.