Spiritual Materialism: an irresolvable oxymoron; the pretension of new-age spirituality, paradoxically marooned by its attachment to outward appearances of a transcendent aspiration; the inanimate imbued with spiritual life. Can the essence of being ever be communicated in an image? When the treachery of language betrays experience or where aesthetics are enslaved to illustrating certain meaning, where can the image go? How can it reclaim the strangeness and inexplicable power latent in the senses, give form to the intangible, to what lies in abeyance in the infinite realms of imagination, emotion and memory?

Guido Van der Werve and his absurd piano on a wistful lake knowingly lean on the Romantic paradigm in search of a correspondence between the melancholy soul and the sublime landscape.

Another mysterious body of water, Gerard Byrne’s photo-document of Loch Ness proposes an image can show something that doesn’t exist, a ‘reality’ that isn’t wedded to truth, but to belief. His lens is a gateway between what is there, and what we project – rural allegories, mythological fantasies, or legendary folklore.

Frampton’s experimental film ‘Nostalgia’ stages another collision between conjecture and vision: entangling photographs of a past, their present moment of combustion and an inevitable future absence. All the while, the narration anachronistically describes the image yet to appear, unknown to the viewer, a movement of prophecy, anticipation and reminiscence of a past.

Godard deploys a similar disjunctive strategy, confounding comprehension as conventional alignment of image and word diverges and is overturned, a rupture through which something creeps. When he inserted the black screen, he returned his audience to the raw materiality of cinematic space, thick, groping darkness, a realm of synesthetic disturbance of the senses.

Ed Atkins’ image of a viscous blackness dripping malevolently down a crisp, fresh apple is so intense, one can taste it, feel it creep upon the skin, know it as pure affect – the image seduces, induces desire, and threatens its inevitable counterpart, the death drive.

The burgeoning blackness of nighttime cloaks a Romantic landscape, but is pierced by a lonesome lantern: light and dark, presence and absence, form the conditions of Barnaby Hosking’s absurd quest to paint an evasive vision.

Kenneth Anger’s lantern points towards the Rabbit Moon of Japanese folklore, with a Surreal twist involving the melancholy soul of commedia dell’ arte – Pierrot.

The same sad clown appears in Noonan’s modern mythology – his black and white montages lament the golden age of cinema, whilst mapping surreal dramas in which his characters are entangled in hermetic ritual, the occult, an obsession with what is beyond the world we know.

In Duncan Marquis’ film ‘Midday’, the play of light and shadow falls on a hand, creating an ambiguous landscape, and bearing witness to the inextricably interwoven flesh of vision.

Gina Buenfeld is a writer and curator based in London who works at Camden Arts Centre.