Argonauts

Author: Sofía Bassi

Title: Argonautas, ELC [En la Cárcel] (Argonauts, ELC [In Jail])

Date: 1969

Material: Oil on canvas and wood

Dimensions: 25.98 × 25.98 inches

Location: Private collection

Rights: Sofía Bassi Foundation

Sofía Bassi’s Argonauts exemplifies her visionary approach to surrealist landscape, enriched with esoteric and mythological symbolism. Painted shortly before her imprisonment, the work anticipates the inward turn her art would take in the early 1970s, while already articulating a cosmological imaginary anchored in transformation and transcendence.

The composition depicts a spectral vessel navigating an undulating, dreamlike sea, enclosed within a circular frame that evokes the form of a mandala or interdimensional portal. The swirling textures and luminous blues draw the viewer into a hypnotic atmosphere of metaphysical navigation, where space is no longer terrestrial but archetypal. The figures aboard the vessel appear translucent, suspended between states of being—suggesting a rite of passage or a journey beyond material reality.

Near the center of the image floats an ovoid form—an alchemical egg that recurs throughout Bassi’s work, and later materialized in her Ovosarcófago. Here, it operates as a symbolic vessel: at once origin, refuge, and vehicle of transcendence. At the periphery, a sword hovers in space, introducing themes of heroic initiation and spiritual conquest, and underscoring Bassi’s ongoing engagement with the language of alchemy.

Argonauts is not a narrative of classical antiquity but a metaphysical reimagining of the voyage itself—as an allegory for the soul’s passage through turbulent psychic waters toward higher states of consciousness. The painting stands as a pivotal work in Bassi’s corpus, mapping a vision of transit across mythic, esoteric, and cosmological planes.