From the Vaults of the Unhinged: The Eye That Escaped the Body

The Eye, Like a Strange Balloon, Mounts Toward Infinity by Odilon Redon (c. 1882)

Odilon Redon and the Art of Psychological Ascent

In 1882, Odilon Redon released a lithograph that still feels eerily modern: The Eye, Like a Strange Balloon, Mounts Toward Infinity.

At first glance, it is deceptively simple. A single eye floats upward over a darkened sea, tethered to a small basket that resembles a skull or severed head. There is no horizon, no destination, no explanation. Only ascent.

Redon created this work as part of To Edgar Poe, a series of lithographs inspired not by specific stories, but by Poe’s atmosphere: his obsession with madness, perception, dread, and the fragile boundary between the conscious and unconscious mind.

Unlike traditional illustration, Redon’s intent was not to depict events, but to visualize internal states. This image does not tell a story. It feels like one.

The eye, isolated and enormous, suggests a consciousness that has outgrown the body that once contained it. Sight becomes autonomous. Thought detaches. The skull-like basket below implies that the mind has already shed its physical shell, leaving only awareness drifting toward something infinite and unknowable.

Redon referred to works like this as his “noirs”—dark visions rendered in black lithographic ink and charcoal. These images emerged from a fascination with dreams, hallucinations, and the unseen mechanisms of the mind. In an era obsessed with scientific progress and rationality, Redon turned inward, toward the irrational and the symbolic.

The sea below is equally important. It is vast, dark, and undefined—a common Symbolist metaphor for the unconscious. The eye does not look outward at the world; it floats above it, unanchored, perhaps even indifferent.

There is no comfort here.
No moral.
No resolution.

Only the unsettling suggestion that perception itself may not need a body, that thought, once awakened, cannot be contained.

More than a century later, the image still resonates. In a time of constant surveillance, disembodied vision, and endless streams of information, Redon’s floating eye feels prophetic. We are still trying to understand what it means to see too much, to think too freely, to drift away from the physical world that grounds us.

This is why the piece belongs in the Vaults of the Unhinged.

Because some images don’t age.
They wait.