Contemporary French Art. - 2, Gérard Garouste, Colette Deblé, Georges Rousse, Geneviève Asse, Martial Raysse, Christian Jaccard, Joël Kermarrec, Danièle Perronne, Danie

Contemporary French Art 2
Gérard Garouste
Colette Deblé
Georges Rousse
Geneviève Asse
Martial Raysse
Christian Jaccard
Joël Kermarrec
Danièle Perronne
Daniel Dezeuze
Philippe Favier
Daniel Nadaud
FAUX TITRE
362
Etudes de langue et littérature françaises

publiées sous la direction de
Keith Busby, †M.J. Freeman,

Sjef Houppermans et Paul Pelckmans
Contemporary French Art 2
Gérard Garouste
Colette Deblé
Georges Rousse
Geneviève Asse
Martial Raysse
Christian Jaccard
Joël Kermarrec
Danièle Perronne
Daniel Dezeuze
Philippe Favier
Daniel Nadaud
Michael Bishop
AMSTERDAM - NEW YORK, NY 2011

Cover illustration: Philippe Favier, from the Antiphonium series.
Courtesy of the artist.
Cover design: Pier Post.
The paper on which this book is printed meets the requirements of

‘ISO 9706: 1994, Information and documentation - Paper for documents -
Requirements for permanence’.
Le papier sur lequel le présent ouvrage est imprimé remplit les prescriptions
de ‘ISO 9706: 1994, Information et documentation - Papier pour documents -
Prescriptions pour la permanence’.
ISBN: 978-90-420-3346-7
E-Book ISBN: 978-94-012-0045-5
© Editions Rodopi B.V., Amsterdam - New York, NY 2011
Printed in The Netherlands
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Preface ......................................................................................... 7
Unrepresenting Meaning: Gérard Garouste ................................. 9
Windows Upon the Unseen: Colette Deblé ............................... 29
The Light of Death, a Sacredness of Doing: Georges Rousse ... 47
The Intimacy of Silence: Geneviève Asse ................................. 69
Hygiene, Thought, Quest, Consent: Martial Raysse .................. 87
The Endless Imprinting of Being: Christian Jaccard ............... 111
Desire and Deception, the Metonymies of Artifice:

Joël Kermarrec ......................................................................... 129
The Plastic Life of the Psyche: Danièle Perronne ................... 147
Structure and Aeration, Freedom and the Unnameable:

Daniel Dezeuze ........................................................................ 165
Proliferation, Mutation, Phantasm, the Ceremony of the Real:

Philippe Favier ......................................................................... 183
The Art of War and Peace: Daniel Nadaud ............................. 203
Conclusion ............................................................................... 221
Selected Bibliography.............................................................. 225

PREFACE
The words I offer here will be extremely brief: the entirety of

Contemporary French Art 1, appearing some two and a half years ago,
I deem to constitute the best introduction I could possibly make to the
second volume which now has reached its completion with some fur-
ther eleven studies of major artists whose work is of equal urgency,
depth and pertinence. My purpose here is thus principally to thank all
of the artists whose work I examine here and who, along with the
many galleries and museums with whom they have collaborated in
bringing us their plastic, but, too, profoundly existentially significant
testimony, have shown great generosity in providing me with mate-
rials, answering certain of my queries and often allowing for ex-
changes that have been of great assistance in furthering my apprecia-
tion of the tireless activity involved in the generation of oeuvres of
considerable proportions. The studies that follow, as with those of the
earlier volume, are predicated on the need I feel to privilege close
‘reading’ of their plastic gestures. Whilst I may draw occasional com-
parisons and establish certain contrasts, it has not been my intention to
overly theorise or historicise in terms too abstracted, too notionally
and, indeed, analytically distanced, from oeuvres which demand a true
concentration rather upon their endless specificities, those characteris-
tics that distinguish them both modally and, if I may put things that
way, ontologically – in regard, that is, to the relation ever developing
between their doing, the poiein that drives them forward, and that
sense of some vital ‘presence to the world’, no matter how tensely ar-
ticulated such a presence may be lived. The chapters that follow will
in consequence seek to dig insistently into the what, the how and the
why of individual oeuvres, without feeling obliged to dwell upon
overlappings and interpertinencies. The Conclusion that will be finally
offered at the close of these eleven chapters will not, either, endeavour
to put the same hat on eleven people who do not share the same resi-
dence or hat size. Indeed may own and wear no hat at all. Let me add
one further note before allowing the book to plunge headlong into the
teeming fascinations, beauties, conceptions and sensings that have en-
gaged me over the last two years or so: there are, of course, artists I
8 Contemporary French Art 2
cannot embrace in either of the two volumes of Contemporary French

Art, artists I admire and who, just conceivably, I may have the oppor-
tunity to speak of elsewhere. Their omission here is a matter of time
and space. As with the work of all of the twenty-two artists the two
volumes tussle with, their work too will beam forth, and must always
be understood to beam forth, from that gesture, that gaze, of apprecia-
tion that is yours, mine, any viewer’s. The words that follow I give as
words of gratitude. The gaze is what ever will matter.
Michael Bishop
Halifax and Wolfville, Nova Scotia
December, 2010
UNREPRESENTING MEANING:
GÉRARD GAROUSTE
To gaze upon works such as La Chambre rouge (1982) or

Sainte Thérèse d’Avila (1983), La Barque et le pêcheur – le pantalon
rouge (1984), or, yet again, any of the 1988 Indiennes, the 2003
Saintes Ellipses or the various paintings of the 2006 suite, L’Ânesse et
la figue, is to enter a figural universe of the strangely, hauntingly fam-
iliar, an at times troubling phantasmagoricalness yet anchored in both
celebration and an ironic postmodernism ever searching for, and
dreaming, value, meaning beyond sayableness.1 La Chambre rouge, a
large 295 x 250 cm chromatically striking oil on canvas, for example,
inverts traditional modes of male-female nudity, dressing woman, bar-
ing male anatomy, doing so moreover whilst offering an ambiguous
drama of sleep, possible intoxication, even death, this in a context of
pure, swirling, undefined and aperspectival theatricality of human be-
ing and doing, an atmosphere of lyrical intensity beyond sentimentali-
ty and narrative fixity. The various Indienne oils of 1988, even larger
(210 x 85 cm or 210 x 690 cm), constitute tapestry-like creations that,
whilst, like La Chambre rouge or La Barque et le pêcheur – le panta-
lon rouge, seeming to obey a representational model, yet defy descrip-
tion with their bizarrely unified yet amorphous, fluid forms, their
floating figures, fish-like, yet bird-like too, and oneirically human, all
harmonised in a swimming theatre of yellows, greens and black upon
lit purples. The huge, exquisitely elegant acrylic and wrought iron in-
stallation Les Saintes Ellipses, first exhibited at the Chapelle Saint
Louis de la Salpêtrière and recently in the Panthéon (2006), soars over
12 metres from its small mirror base to unfold the eight boldly and
exultantly flared wings of its octagonal painted trumpet revealing the
elliptically proffered significance of the forms and phenomena of
emergent, ever surging createdness, as well as the texts inscribed on
the inner surfaces of the vast painted ‘cornet’, visible and meditatable
via their mirrored images.
1
See Selected Bibliography. Many online resources are available, but there is no per-
sonal website.
Critics from Philippe Dagen and Pierre Cabanne to Marc

Augé and François Rachline have lavished high praise on an oeuvre
that Catherine Strasser has argued embodies l’inqualifiable, factors at
once beyond neat classification and exuding ineffableness. Louis and
Maurice Ladey have spoken of a ‘rewriting of the history of art that is
[Garouste’s] alone’; Marc Le Bot has seen in the great sweep of a
work beginning with the 1969 Dessins monumentaux, through the ever
evolving figures of ‘indianness’ and ‘classicalness’, down to more re-
cent work stemming from Garouste’s readings of Dante, Rabelais,
Cervantes and other texts, the teeming traces of ‘human destiny dra-
matised’; Anne Dagbert, thinking of the 1973 Comédie policière but
implicitly of much else, has written of an ‘insolent and caustic vis-ion
of art’ that is constantly, if most subtly, ever at play – a vision buoyed
by the paradox of Garouste’s avowal of a ‘need for rules, sac-redness,
taboos, myths’ and yet his equally confessed consciousness that he
can only generate a pretence of belief in them.2 Garouste’s global ges-
ture, of course, may be said to be shrouded in the shimmer of the
make-believe, an atmosphere where l’être and le paraître act out their
impossible resolution – indeed, one is ever tempted to speak of their
inseparableness, just as one might deem indivisible, subtly melded in
indefinable ways, the real and the imaginative, matter and mind, or
Garouste’s ‘representation’ of Le Classique et l’Indien, whether in his
early oil on paper (1972), his 1977 play of that name (which is, in
2008, being once again staged in Paris), or comparative-contrastive
analyses we might endeavour to make with respect to not only works
such as the 1971 Le Classique and the 1988 Indienne ser-ies, but also
many other oils and gouaches, labelled Sans titre, given to us in the
1980’s and 1990’s. The quirkiness of much of Garouste’s oeuvre is
not at all that of a Ben Vautier, provocative, funky, tongue-in-cheek,
nor that of a François Morellet, formally clever, though baroquely,
capriciously minimalist. Garouste’s idiosyncraticalness reveals a per-
sonal plunge into the phantasmatic, a surreal strangeness evident in
multiple forms: the 1970 L’Homme-papillon or Le miroir, le pendu et
le vase bleu (1985) or, again, the numerous oils, etchings, gouaches
and sculptures of, for example, the 1987-91 period, beautifully repro-
duced in the Kunstverein Hannover`s 1992 Gérard Garouste. This is
2
All translations are my own throughout this book.
Unrepresenting Meaning: Gérard Garouste 11
an art where the seemingly angelic and the perhaps demonic, the sa-
cred and the profane, readily fuse their energies, engage and mingle
their mysteries. It is, moreover, not a matter, simply, of freely and
openly meditating such energies via pseudo-transcriptions of ancient
Hebraic and other texts, as in paintings such as Les Anges déchus or
Enoch et l’ange, for the kind of pure allusiveness such works convey
via their play of light and dark and their staging of formless presences
is mirrored in many other works such as the 1988 Indienne pieces or
the etchings just mentioned, where grace and menace, delicacy and
seeming aggression, wingedness and sacrifice appear to be knotted
together in dreamscapes ever on the brink of nightmarish phantasma-
goria.
Lest one might thus imagine an oeuvre in full psychic dérive,

the mind and the imagination projecting the pure theatre of its utterly
unconstrained contents, I would emphasise immediately two factors.
Firstly, that the work of Garouste, though skirting about certain forms,
experiences even, of what he himself has called madness, yet remains
an oeuvre, a series of works and a vast, ongoing deeply personal and
lived démarche, that ever concerns itself with its own ethics, with the
swirling meaning of its engagement with self and world. I shall return
with some intensity to this finely balanced equation, but suffice it to
say in this initial foray into Garouste’s plastic universe that an oil such
as the 1978 Bouchon de champagne – with its startling orange-red
staging of two women, a man turned towards them, a baby, a large
dog, this interior domestic scene set in turn against an equally dramat-
ic backcloth of crashing waves, wild sky and landscape, the cork sit-
ting in the silent pool of its pure, unstabilisable implicitness – such a
painting, like so many to come, whether offering the full-bodiedness
of Colomba (1982), the oneiricism shrouding the stick figures of Pay-
sage indien, or the dis- and re-membered humanity of recent series
such as Portraits (2004) or L’Ânesse et la figue (2006), such a paint-
ing, whilst rife with the early modes of a strangeness, a tension, an
exile-within-the-familiar that many later works will push to the ex-
tremes of unsettledness, eccentricity and quasi-delirium, yet reveals
that powerful engagedness that is ever Garouste’s with the drama of
human life, its charm and its rawness, its fragility in the midst not only
of the external stage – the earth, the cosmos – on which it plays itself
out, but, too, the inner, psychic, emotional stage of incarnation. Here,
then, is an art that depicts wildness and contingency, whilst simultan-

eously struggling, choosing to struggle, with a deeper content of its
signifiers, meditating the very ethos of its own bizarre, unfathomable
yet evokable urgency. The second factor I would wish to bring to the
fore is the tensionality at work in Garouste’s oeuvre, a tensionality
now evident in moving from one work to another, now within a single
painting or other creation, and which both opposes and joins, on the
one hand, the disturbing, the physically and psychologically challeng-
ing in a context of unknowing, uncertainty, even disabusedness, and,
on the other hand, the playful, the ironic, even what we may take as a
certain jubilancy. The large oil on canvas (250 x 310 cm) La Constel-
lation du chien (1982), for example, gives us – and, if I stress here the
role of the viewer-receiver, it is in perfect coincidence with Garouste’s
own relinquishment of interpretive power – the same dark, swirling
chromatics as Colomba, plunges us into the extraordinary, unheimlich
yet inalienably familiar human doing glimpsed in its unsituatable, at
once symbolic and visceral, dramaticalness, a world of vast, cosmic
energies, now awing, now truly frightening, ever relativising our
doing, and perhaps our very being. La Barque et le pêcheur – le pan-
talon rouge, not dissimilarly, may disturb as we sense what we may
feel to be the root nature of the human condition, the shadow of death
(and thus the enigma of our very being) cast over human action, its
indec-ipherable pertinence, the strange arbitrariness of its accoutre-
ments (: red pants) – all of this yet perhaps, and incomprehensibly,
somehow offset by that same strange doing, that faire, that barely ac-
countable, outlandish poiein,3 to which the artist equally gives himself
in a tense gesture of playing with its fantastic feasibilities. And Orion,
le classique, of the same period (1991-92), offers a memorable scene
of some primordial ‘golden age’, a tumultuous dangerous time-place
of survival or succumbing with its dark and gleaming muscular dance
of body and instinctual thought: any ‘play’ here is that of the raw thea-
tre of being-in-the-world, the wild exuberance of perhaps brief incar-
3
I use throughout the notion of poiein and poietic in order to emphasise the distinc-
tion that can be made between a generic, formal thinking of the poetic and one that
has in mind that raw etymological sense of ‘doing’, ‘making’, beyond aesthetic con-
siderations, a ‘creating’ simultaneously visceral, gestural and blindingly, instinctively
psychical, mental in the most fundamental of mentation’s modes.
nation, signifying ... the pure intensity of itself? Other work, however,
reveals what may be taken as a greater level of ease, even ludicity,
ironicalness and even humour. The 1982 Déjeuner sur l’herbe pas-
tiches and transforms, picking up on Manet’s own subversions, ho-
nouring them, feeling them out further. The 1999 Désir, a smaller oil
(73 x 60 cm), manifests a significant change in manner if we compare
it, say, to any Indienne or the 1989 La Conversation. The dog-horse it
features is in marked interplay with the dog that can so often accom-
pany le Classique, with or without l’Indien (cf. the 1982 Le Classique,
le miroir et le chien); sexual arousal, its intensity but no doubt also its
bizarre, slightly ludicrous improbability, takes thematic centre stage;
the human figure is shown, beyond gratuitous disfiguration, as an
emblem of the self’s pure and complex ‘circularity’: the forms, heigh-
tened by the forceful chromatics, are stark yet bold, even humorous.
The 2007 Logique, part of the delightfully and liberatingly titled 2009
exhibition La Bourgogne, la famille et l’eau tiède, goes yet much fur-
ther towards easefulness and jubilancy in setting before us the four
grinning faces of its triptych, the twisting puzzle of their bodies, the
coy gazes which engage, entice and smilingly challenge the viewer,
the white and black disk-mirrors hinting perhaps at the temptation and
futility of narcissism. The ‘logic’ of Logique?: a juggling and playing
with self’s being, art as a pure ludic, though meditated, never gratuit-
ous poiein (: doing, making, creating) of being’s pure plasticity.
I should like now to examine more pointedly the shifting

modes of Gérard Garouste’s art, firstly the material means to which it
has recourse, and, secondly, the manners and styles it chooses to dep-
loy in attaining to a fulfilment of those driving if elusive purposes that
propel it and to which, prior to any concluding observations that will
emerge, I shall seek to offer particular attention. Critics have often
remarked upon the relative influence of past masters upon the work of
Garouste, and the correspondingly minimal impact of the activities of
his contemporaries upon his démarche. If, yet, Garouste remains most
conscious of the work of, say, Beuys, Twombly, Baselitz, Warhol –
with whom he has exhibited –, or else, nearer to home, Buren, Toroni
or Parmentier, and if he recognizes the great import of Duchamp in
bringing to a close art’s representational period, his decision principal-
ly to paint and his view of the non-modernity of painting as relieving
him of any need to seek novelty thus take his gesture and his oeuvre
out of any strictly chronological necessities of means and manners.

François Rachline argues that ‘therein lies [Garouste’s] genius’ – in a
freedom that may dip unconstrainedly into the ‘memory’ of art, simul-
taneously appropriate (Tintoretto, Rubens, Titian, etc., it may be ar-
gued for some of Garouste’s work, and Chardin, too, and Chirico and
Goya) and ‘deny’, transmute, project into the past’s infinite futures,
just as the produced present plasticity may retroject us back out of the
fixity of the present – as with, Garouste writes, the application of the
Hebrew prefix vav. Thus, nothing in the past can be said to determine
present action, whilst at the same time past art and text may become a
‘reservoir of unexplored possibleness’, as Rachline rightly argues.
The material means exploited by the art of Gérard Garouste

are, however, far more extensive than painting’s oils on canvas,
which, yet, remain a dominant feature whilst ringing the changes of
manner and technique with regard to the application of the traditional
tools of painting. Le Classique et l’Indien of 1977, whilst embedded in
his early paintings of 1971-72 and greatly dependent upon the decors
he paints in 1977, yet opts for a projection of such plasticity onto the
stage where Garouste’s strange play, ‘nearer to performance or a hap-
pening than traditional theatre’ Pierre Cabanne suggests, actionless,
fusing initially spectatorship and spectacle, offers an ‘argument’ one
might think critical to all of the artist’s subsequently developed oeu-
vre: ‘someone normal tells the story of someone else’ – here, the
‘classic’, supposedly rational, coherent, articulating the beingness of
the ‘indian’, his alter ego, for normality is only the secret and utterly
relative face of the ‘madness’ he thus relates. That such extreme hy-
bridisation and radical displacement of artistic means continues to at-
tract Garouste will soon become apparent with the creation of the
1979 Comédie policière and La Règle du jeu of same year, but it is
also worth noting, somewhat parenthetically, that Le Classique et
l’Indien has just re-emerged in 2008, at the time of this writing, with,
once again, Garouste in an acting role, the play, ‘spectacle drolatique’
as it is billed, yet transformed in multiple ways – an ever changing
spectacle-performance-theatre, a conscious con-fusion of identities, a
constant interplay and meditation of painting, texts of various prove-
nance (Rabelais, Bible, Kabbalah), and so on –, and, at least in part,
seeking to convey both the idea that, as Garouste puts it, ‘painting is
not an end in itself, but a means’, and the parallel notion that ‘all is
linked’ beyond the appearance of being’s/art’s fragmentedness.

Comédie policière, using the classical elements of painting, oil on
canvas, sets before us a non-linear, only loosely logically gathered se-
ries of eleven paintings staging the unsolvable puzzle of a story in-
volving the same man, the same two women, child and dog we have
seen in Bouchon de champagne. Other artists such as Louise Bour-
geois or Annette Messager, Sophie Calle or Ben, can bypass painting
to create a theatre that envelops and teases the mind and the senses. It
is most unusual, as here with Garouste, to give over painterly means
to, on the one hand, paint’s capacity to produce rich, quasi-mimetic
sensuality, on the other, to an illusionist absence of discourse that only
confirms painting’s pure posturing as something other than itself: in
this way painting is shown to be able to produce the same masking,
dancing, gesturing, the same expectancy and anxiety that these eleven
canvases portray, and, at the same time, reveal the pure fancifulness of
such a production, its enchanting, captivating emptiness, if you like.
La Règle du jeu goes, materially, procedurally, much further: it too,
involves a staging of arch, audacious, pure implicitness, that of art, its
process and its product, but its means transmute significantly: a small
earthenware base (33 x 26 x 27cm), four bronze ‘needles’ thrust into
it, various moulded pieces, the whole marking out a labyrinth of po-
tential interconnectedness and accompanied both by a series of sixteen
photographs and references to mythological figures, some of which
are explored too in paintings ‘outside’ the theatre of La Règle du jeu –
in Cerbère et le masque (1980), for example. If there are rules to the
mental play with/of art’s material means, they clearly are the self’s,
Garouste’s, though they are equally proffered to be reworked in what
Francis Ponge would term the fabrique4 – but of the other, you, me, in
the mental, interpretive manufacturing of an indeterminacy that is yet
witting, conscious of its play.
4
Whilst it is true that for Ponge, this place of ‘manufacture’ is one allowing, essential-
ly, for the deploying of intellection in the form of linguistic analogy and ‘differentiali-
ty’, a place wherein object becomes ‘obplay’ and ‘objoy’, reality slipping into its
purely and ‘thickly’ semantic clothing, yet it remains that the production of obplay
and objoy is ever also the task of the reader/observer/thinker Ponge is not, an other
charged with the building of one of many other fabriques, which are, equally, manu-
facturing devices: the body and all that pertains to its impact on mind has its role. To
convince oneself of the pertinence of this latter point for Garouste, one need only read
his recent autobiography, L’Intranquille.
Sculpture of various modes is by no means a rare creative

stratagem in the work of an artist who yet is known principally for his
painting. Take, for example, the twelve pieces exhibited in Hannover
in 1992, largely crafted in wrought iron and terra cotta, but also in
bronze. They can now bring that aerial but supple stick-like minimali-
ty to the surprisingly graceful presence they impose via their size (410
x 340 x 32 cm, for example), now a more compacted, denser form (54
x 20 x 33 cm, for example) to their untitled strangeness, now a combi-
nation of the chunky and the wiry, the latter requiring elasticity and
elongation to set off its dynamics. The use of metal, usually wrought
iron, is central to various other major works by Garouste such as La
Dive Bacbuc of 1998 with its painted canvases all hung about a circu-
lar metal frame, or Les Saintes Ellipses whose eight painted panels
soar high upon the sturdiness of their towering flared iron supports, or
again, the 1995 painting and wrought iron creation for the Bibli-
othèque Nationale de France, titled La Rosée. Hommage à Cervantès.
Ceramic work can equally constitute an important creative means for
Garouste, witness the work done in 1994 for the Palais de Justice in
Lyon, also involving sculptural pieces. Notwithstanding the mastery
of a variety of techniques, materials and procedural visions such
works deploy, it remains that painting does not cease to be Gérard Ga-
rouste’s primary means of conveying the energies, the meditations and
explorations at the heart of his creative gesture, though, once again,
our conception of the act and place of painting must stay fluid. We
have already seen this with, say, La Dive Bacbuc where the canvases,
painted on both sides, form a kind of decorated roofless tent. Then
there are the ceilings and friezes, done in 1992, for example, for the
‘First Lady’s Chamber’ at the Elysée, or, in 2000, for the Salle des
mariages de l’Hôtel de Ville in Mons. Just as the 1977 staging of Le
Classique et l’Indien involved the painting of the play’s sets, and the
1979 Comédie policière depended entirely on an implicit ‘staging’ of
its eleven component canvases, so do we find Garouste’s acceptance
of the commission to paint a huge new stage curtain for the Théâtre du
Châtelet in Paris to be in perfect accord not only with his love for the
theatre but, too, his free and easy contextualisation of the gesture and
the product of painting: no museal compulsion, no sense of some aus-
tere sacrosanctness attaching to its exhibition, rather a reinsertion the-
reof in a working environment that yet emphasises its own intrinsic
combination of the illusory and the magically cathartic. ‘Painting’,
however, for Garouste, as for many artists, can assume numerous mat-
erial modes: the oils may give way to acrylics, as with the various In-
diennes or Les Saintes Ellipses; paint proper can yield to aquatint, en-
cre de Chine, pencil, charcoal, sanguine, pastel; the whole of such an
arsenal can be ditched for lithographs and etchings. Garouste’s great
artisanal alertness can lead to the preparation of his own substances,
moreover, and is reflected in the great chromatic sensitivity and range
his works manifest. And, finally, in this most brief assessment of the
material means Garouste deploys, I would emphasis the significance
and the relative originality of, firstly, the seeming off-handedness im-
plied by the incorporation into art of its ‘errors’, erasures, its marginal
microstudies of detail, even personal notes that one might have
thought likely to be relegated to documents external to the artwork;
secondly, the role of language, reproduced textual fragments once
again within the framework of the painting itself and, commonly
enough, in addition to observations written outside of the plastic are-
na.
Beyond, yet entirely via, such material means of creation

there lie, of course, the modes and manners of figural process and
conceptualisation. For Garouste this involves a number of tensely de-
veloped and paradoxically interlocking elements which I shall seek to
examine in telescoped form:
1: Garouste’s art is elaborated in various serial manners.

There is the strict seriality that groups paintings using an iden-
tical title: the Sans titre of certain periods in particular (1986-
87, 1990-92), but there is no period when such designation
falls utterly from favour; the paintings that have centred upon,
for example, now Dante, now Cervantes, now Villon, dipping
into often extensive textual material to create a freely ensuing
ensemble of plastic meditation and accompaniment; or there is
the looser serialness that combines and interlaces, for exam-
ple, the Indiennes with the plays of 1977 and 2008 (Le Classi-
que et l’Indien) and yet other works such as Orion, le classi-
que. Essentially, all such serial manners betray both spontane-
ous obsessiveness and the desire to come to terms, ethical,
spiritual, psychological terms, with particular thematics,
myths, intellectualised structures that have caught the imagi-
nation and tested the rational capacity of many.
2: to accomplish such exploration Garouste tends himself to

resort to an apparently narrative manner, though he deems
narrativity to constitute, for the artist-thinker he has become, a
‘trap’. To gaze upon the 1978 pastel and pencil Le Classique
et l’Indien or the oil on paper work of 1972 is to be cast into
recognisable yet very differingly fabled settings, but in both
cases, as with many works to come, and no matter the level of
oneiricism or idiosyncrasy, we understand that we are plunged
into the very deep strangeness of human doing and being, its
fabulous drama beyond the limits of definitive, definable
anecdote.
3: in consequence, the ‘story’ of the human condition reveals

what Garouste himself has called its ‘secrecy’, the ‘enchant-
ment’, too, of its, despite all, unspokenness, its flagrant ob-
servableness clad yet in an obscurity that only the presump-
tuous would convert into neat rational equations. It is via such
manners of the unsayable yet seen in contexts we recognise as
mythically pertinent that Garouste’s art elaborates itself. The
wonderful 1984 La Danse et la lutte, with its mingling of
darkness and goldenness, its flashes of pure white and celes-
tial blue, is a perfect illustration of that Rimbaldian rhythmic
dance of human doing that yet is simultaneous with its, as
Victor Hugo would deem it, heroic struggle – yet, as with
works such as Adhara (1981) or the recent Ellipse (2001), the
‘narrative’ is so vast, so universal, so stripped of any anecdo-
tally contextualisable specifics that, in a sense, once more, we
feel we are immersed in the wild, primordial ‘indianness’ in-
distinguishable from the only seemingly illusorily steadying
epistemological impulse of ‘classicalness’.
4: the challenge for Gérard Garouste, then, revolves, one

might say, about, on the one hand, the desire to ‘say’, to show,
to provide a place of figural meditation, and, on the other, the
equally felt desire to eschew representation, a desire predi-
cated on the sense of the radical impossibility of any gesture
of representation, and this, despite the temptation thereof or
the easy slippage into its reductiveness. Works such as that
done for the 1997 stained glass windows of Notre Dame de
Talant and, to a lesser extent, the earlier large oil on canvas
(200 x 300 cm) Sainte Therèse d’Avila, put to the test the ges-
ture of non-representative yet referentially loaded art and Ga-
rouste has spoken of a dissatisfaction and a discomfort with
respect to the former of these two undertakings. The series of
paintings grouped under the exhibition title of L’Ânesse et la
figue may be said to run a similar gauntlet in the sense that
Garouste plunges headlong into the interpretation of signifi-
cant texts which he is not at all reluctant to quote and which,
in principle, run the risk of overdetermining his painting. Ga-
rouste’s chosen manner demands, and finds, a great sensitivity
to such a challenge and it is unsurprising to discover that his
mantra, recently reconfirmed, dwells upon the futile preten-
tiousness of absolute naming and figuration: ‘The certainty of
represent-ation, he maintains, rightly, I should argue, is mere
vanity’. The dys-figurations we observe, especially in Ga-
rouste’s more recent works where his manner takes to a dis-
membering and seemingly absurd, ‘mad’ but also humorous
re-membering of human anatomy – the canvases of, again,
L’Ânesse et la figue or Kezive la ville mensonge or the current
La Bourgogne, la famille et l’eau tiède amply reveal such a
manner –, such dys-figurations, with their bizarrely and witti-
ly sinusoidal distortions, clearly constitute a marked refusal of
mimesis whilst allowing, encouraging, broad margins of relat-
ing to human drama. And, of course, such a manner has mul-
tiplied its options from the very outset of Garouste’s plastic
adventure, as we see the mutations take us from, say, the
phantasmal, hybrid, amoebic Homme-grenouille of 1968 or,
of course, the quirky Le Classique et l’Indien of 1972, through
the amorphous creatures of the 1988 Indiennes or the strange
theatre of form and unform of Le Qohelet et la comédie
(1989), down to the various Portraits of 2004 where we ap-
preciate Garouste`s Giacometti-like sense of some fundamen-
tal indeterminacy at the very heart of being and human identi-
ty.
5: such manners, I should finally maintain, are not simply,

perhaps not at all, caricatural. Irony, fancifulness, mental and
emotional (self-)liberation have their significant place, but de-
rision and gratuitous, indifferent mockery do not. The sublime
always vies with the ludic. There is nothing slight about Ga-
rouste`s work, it is urgent, intense, it has depth and a purpose
beyond the framework of intellectual and spiritual normality,
easy logicalness. If theatricality reigns, it is because the thea-
tre of human doing, poiein, is precisely one where dance and
struggle, La Danse et la lutte as the eloquent 1984 oil has it,
endlessly pull us to and fro between joy and anxiety, instinc-
tively deployed buoyancy and the great tussle of a combative
energy driven by fear and wariness. In a sense, too, Garouste`s
plastic theatrical manner stages a dramatic playing with the
‘play’, the loose-fitting, indefinable nature of human being, its
swirling mythicalness and an unfinishableness that lies at the
centre of its ‘narrative’. Works such as the various Indiennes
may, as Pierre Cabanne has justly remarked, constitute a
‘challenge to painting’, but their manner does not so much
seek to proceed iconoclastically – Garouste’s art reveals re-
spect for and transmutation of iconographic codes – as it en-
deavours to find some relative, volatile and elastically perti-
nent correspondence between itself and the nature of being, its
ever fluid, elusive and unstabilisable meaning which human
discourse congeals at its spiritual and intellectual peril. It does
not come as a surprise that Garouste rejects the neat precision
and categoricalness that would resume his ‘style’ as ‘baroque’
or ‘fantastic’ or ‘mannierist’. Manner, deemed to be style, ve-
neer, surface, is not at centre-stage in Garouste’s oeuvre, even
though the forms it produces are what initially impact us; as
with a poet such as Yves Bonnefoy or a fellow artist such as
Gérard Titus-Carmel, form is traversed in order to reach
through to domains ultimately ethical and ontological.5 The
very face of being is at stake in the oil on canvas Portraits of
2004, just as much as in the 1968 Homme-grenouille with its
ink and pencil collaging on paper.
5
We have here the essence of Bonnefoy’s privileging of ‘presence’ over ‘image’, the
experience of our beingness beyond concept, gnosis, solidified mental structure. All
‘form’, in this way, becomes a channel, a means, rather than an end in what is unfi-
nishable, fluid, becoming. This does not invalidate the provisional, fatally ephemeral,
mortal claims of ‘beauty’, aesthetic emotion, but it does reorient art towards what
Titus-Carmel calls one’s ‘presence to the world’.
For Gérard Garouste, as indeed for many others, Marcel Du-

champ signals the close of the long era of representational art and, in
consequence, forces upon the artist a self-consciousness that brings
him or her face to face with what Garouste terms in the book-cum-
catalogue L’Ânesse et la figue ‘the question of the subject’. The latter,
he clarifies, is ‘a matter of revealing the power of the image as it has
shaped our eye, and of showing its purpose and its ambiguities’. Be-
fore, then, dealing more intensely with the purposes of art as Garouste
perceives them, it is important to appreciate that his conception of the
subject, the subject matter, of his a-figurative démarche, already goes
beyond a simple giving of plastic images and form to fuse such a ges-
ture with its question, its ongoing self-interrogation, a giving that con-
stantly takes away from any presumed straightforwardness we may
believe implicit in its gift. It is for this reason that the teeming existen-
tial traces generated by works such as the 1979 Paysage indien, or the
1985 Terrae motus, or, again, the 1998 Trois frères en chemin perform
a shimmering dance of the discourse that they may be said to set be-
fore us. Human being-in-the-world, human relationality and a full
gamut of human doing, yes, certainly, we appreciate these to be the
subject of Garouste’s painting, just as he can tell Catherine Strasser in
1984 that ‘the nude, landscape and still life’ lie in significant relation
to this ‘subject’ – but, no flat, static portrayal is involved, all groun-
dedness remains volatile, unlocalisable in time and place, phantasmat-
ic, implicit at best. Representation trembles, blurs, manifests its un-
manif-estableness, its extreme mythicality, a heroic human masque-
rade recognisable only glimmeringly, caught in what Garouste terms
in Portraits ‘the indeterminacy of worlds’. The wavering finger of
myth as Marc Augé writes in the context of Kezive la ville mensonge
‘sow[s] question marks’. The subject of its plasticised images affirms
no fixity beyond themselves; it is a fiction, a story, but with no realist
or naturalist pretensions and mirroring, whether à la Stendhal or à la
Zola. And yet, if this is tantamount to arguing that the deep subject
matter of art is the ‘illusion’ Garouste tells Hortense Lyon his own
painting perpetrates, let us not in our eagerness to embrace this see-
mingly simple equation Art = Art ≠ Reality, overlook his simultane-
ous assertion reported by Laurent Busine in Quixote apocrifo, that a
fundamental element of the subject of his work remains the (infinitely
dreamable and meditatable) matter of ‘men amongst men’ – i.e. the
fabled, fab-ulous, mad-wise, indian-classical comportments of their
being-together. Though an ‘alibi’, as Pierre Cabanne writes, art and its

‘subject’ yet may be ‘believed’ in, for, I should argue, they allow for
the simultaneous, fused exploration of two seemingly paradoxical
things: the ethos, the attributable purposes, meanings and values of
our hum-an being and doing, and the utter indefinableness, the only
apparent, chimerical firmness of image and discourse applied to such
being and doing. As Garouste says in the context of L’Ânesse et la fi-
gue, ‘there remains the immaterial[,] there remains the question of the
subject’.6
The purposes of this fairly extraordinary art may be manifold

and complex, but they remain coherent and most consciously medit-
ated and assumed. Perhaps first and foremost, Garouste’s emphasis
veers away from aesthetic ambition; form, its delicacy, its refinement,
its technical adroitness, its arguable beauty – none of this does he care
to dwell upon. Once again in L’Ânesse et la figue he confirms what
surely we have sensed from the outset, with L’Homme papillon (1970)
or the 1972 oil on paper Le Classique et l’Indien, namely that ‘art
ought to have an ethical function, a social reason to exist beyond aes-
thetic criteria’. Not that such a self-positioning should be thought to
discount the beauty of form and colour: the latter cannot but generate
a mode of appeal and satisfaction to which artist and viewer in turn
cannot help but remain sensitive. It is just that, as a Denis Roche said
of poetic writing, one does not involve oneself in it to produce some
joli méli-mélo.7 Not dissimilarly, an Yves Bonnefoy can even desire to
destroy the potential beauties of one’s created formal perfections, pre-
cisely to remind the self of the larger ethical, spiritual dimensions of
its poiein, the vaster ontological project in which it is engaged.8 In this
sense, such a purposing, whilst consenting to this project, involves
equally a level of resistance, neither to earlier representational man-
ners per se, nor even to those, including Garouste’s own, of the pres-
6
My italics.
7
Roche’s desire that poetry and art reveal their ‘combativity’, rather than settling for
some formal nicety, is tantamount to declaring the need for an urgency that can only
be described as broadly ontological: spiritual in the most open-ended sense of the
term, searching, querying on every level of the human ‘logos’: psychological, politic-
al, sociological, ethical. Though beyond flagrant paradigms, clearly.
8
Cf. Du mouvement et de l’immobilité de Douve.
ent: resistance ‘aim[s simply] to show how the eye is prepared for
submission’, he tells us. Always potentially prepared to yield, that is,
to the power of the image, to take it to be a figuration of the real.
Linked to this, as all these purposes and orienting values form

a tight knot of intention, there is the pleasure of painting, a jouissance
not, however, stemming from sheer sensuality, the voluptuousness of
shape, texture, chromatics, but rather from what Garouste terms, in
commenting on his Quixote apocrifo, a ‘wealth of knowledge [allow-
ing the artist] to play with myths themselves’. The work around Cer-
vantes’ novel or the paintings for Kezive la ville mensonge, based on
the biblical story of Juda and Tamar, reveal something of the power of
such jouissance, whereas series such as La Comédie po-licière or the
Indiennes manifest Garouste’s capacity simultaneously to generate
images of a more strictly private mythology and beyond any aesthetics
of newness, though leaving ‘the beaten paths of congealed iconogra-
phy’, to succeed in a magnificent and truly epistemologically volup-
tuous theatrical juggling with that ‘absence of discourse’ he believes
painting achieves. Such a theatre of absence, of course, far from creat-
ing a void, provokes and produces, in what Bernard Blistène regards
as a conjoined ‘staging of the disorientation of the viewer’, a tumult of
imaginable discourse, a bubbling whirlpool of thought and phantasm
refusing to settle for the comforts of firm and systematised conceptua-
lisation.
The purpose of Garouste’s art, then, we may argue further, is

to attain to the knowledge, the ‘truth’, of the unsayable. Art’s self-
conscious response to the lived and the observable does not aim for
closure, opening rather that dialoguing and accompanying at the visi-
ble heart of so much of Garouste’s work. The large oil on canvas of
1989, La Conversation, for example, offers us the most curious of in-
sect-like creatures, conversing, ever seeking meaning, exchanging the
relativities of never congealable, ongoing meaning: mean-ing, a flow-
ing errancy, a living unfixedness of the being, the doing and the
psychic mouvance of self and other, the ever-otherness of all. Surely
the early paintings and the 1977/2008 play(s), all titled Le Classique et
l’Indien, stage for us such unresolvable, fundamentally silent parley-
ing, a journeying together of A and B, who are, moreover, dimensions
of each other, so that the conversing, whilst dialogic, is equally a
complex, a folded-together monologue of only seeming differences.
Such conversing-without-closure can be seen, too, in almost all of the

works of the recent Kezive la ville mensonge series, where, as with
Beckett in so many of his plays, but his proses also, Compagnie by
way of example, no summum of speakable truth or understanding is
achieved, though we may live, observe and meditate the ‘truth’ of
meaning’s fluidity, its smiling unsettledness, its ironic, obsessing inef-
fableness. L’Autre Rive hints at such a ceaseless gazing elsewhere for
illusory finality; Le Sceau et la vanité thrusts together ephemeral hum-
an gesture, death in the form of a skull, and a seal perhaps – the per-
haps is the very purposing of such a painting – of secret, occult or
even truly cosmic meaning; L’Échange, a diptych moreover, and
hence offering an immediate multiplication and complexification,
gives us on the left panel, a shrouded figure with dog at a crossroads, a
small figure (an ‘Indian’?) approaching, while the right panel, disturb-
ing and quasi-sublime at once, reveals a male figure, an arm stuffed
chokingly into his mouth, three golden angelic hands proffered from
on high to the tormented figure below, a crescent moon dispassionate-
ly, simply, there in the night sky. ‘Truths’, indeed, of a vast oneiric,
even at times nightmarish unsayableness, and art as their chosen ve-
hicle.
The fact remains, as Gérard Garouste informs us, that ‘I seek

truths far beyond painting’. It is a high, though visceral and obsessive,
purpose and one that, whilst partly coinciding with the artist’s socio-
ethical vision, must be seen as not constrained by the latter. Nothing,
precisely, in Garouste’s démarche or in his produced plastic oeuvre,
smacks of the didactic, for the ‘show[ing] how the eye is prepared for
submission’ which we have seen him wish to accomplish, takes place
via a process not of orientation but of disorientation, not of banally
explicative and explicit art but of an art that opens and provokes, and
does not pretend to know anything other than the unspeakable. To
look at Garouste’s 1995-96 L’Adam aux nuages is to realize that its
purposing ‘exceeds its sign’, to echo Yves Bonnefoy speaking of the
relationship of ‘presence’ to its ‘image’: this is not painting content to
dwell within its own confines; it seeks the primordial, the cosmic; it is
simple yet radiantly contemplative, hinting at some pure energy of
original being, offering its image though knowing well, and never too
well, the fragileness of image in the face of intuited presence. Paint-
ings as seemingly distinct as Isaïe d’Issenheim or Le Coup de l’étrier,
both from the 2007 series La Bourgogne, la famille et l’eau tiède,

equally seek to wrestle with demons and visions far in excess of an act
of painting deemed to be focussed upon the niceties of its own pres-
tige. The agenda here is the psychic vitality of the self, its capacity for
self-knowledge, for breaking through taboos in order to survive and
psychically thrive. If painting remains a vehicle of such exploration,
liberation and ‘transcendence’, the vehicle is not, in and of itself, the
agenda Garouste sets himself.
However, in the midst of such desiderata, there can equally be

no doubt that the process and the medium of the art Garouste practices
are drawn towards some essential, improbable and ironic divineness
felt to reside at the centre of all that is: ‘maintain, he writes, entertain
the idea of a fundamental, perhaps mystical absence’ – that ineffable-
ness we have so often seen him argue the artist’s poiein functions to
generate in order to ‘un-represent’. When speaking with Hortense
Lyon of the figuration of the divine, Garouste is clear that what is re-
quired is a saying, a painting – one thinks of Notre Dame de Talant or
Les Saintes Ellipses, but these are but the flagrant tips of the iceberg
of the sacred for a Garouste – of ‘what God is not’. The disarticula-
tions and re-memberings, the disfigurations and transmutations so
powerfully present in Garouste’s work, from La Règle du jeu, the end-
less Sans titre works, to the precisely ever strange amorphous pre-
sences of Le Qohelet et la comédie, are the residue of an instinctively
dreamed purposing towards the sublime, an ecstasy at once of tears
and laughter, an experience of sublimation whereby the image
‘speaks’ via a non-frontal deflected unsaying, a metamorphosis that
veils as it subliminally reveals. Such sublime subliminalness in Ga-
rouste is played out via an imagination beyond limits, laws, interdicts,
beyond too any illusion in the face of what Gérard Georges Lemaire
terms ‘metaphysical collapse’, though – critically – ever engendering
what Anne Dagbert subtly argues is ‘an elucidation of an enigma of
relationships between the visible and the invisible’. The sublime may
thus hint at realms of being, functioning, (sur)realness, but such invi-
sibleness is ever lived out as what I can only describe as an experience
of ‘transcendence’ – of all our presumptious and reductive equations
of the real – within the immanent.
Sublimation in Garouste entails in effect no metaphysical cat-

apulting into some excarnate, unfleshy, un-human ontic time-space. If
the utopian is ‘the very purpose of painting’ for Gérard Garouste, as

he says in the context of his work on Cervantes, it is performed exis-
tentially and artistically at ‘daisy-level’, as he puts it so sweetly,
speaking this time of his Quixote apocrifo. Ideality is thus lived,
thought and dramatised via an art sensing the already infinite abun-
dance of ontic mystery, its wretchednesses, its delights, its sadnesses
and its joys, on the plane of the quotidian – a dailiness, moreover, to
be thought through and (a)figuratively performed in all of its teeming
post-modern supplementarity, that différance somehow pitching hum-
an being and doing, as the Ladeys suggest, beyond good and evil. Any
purposing towards the ‘divine’, the ‘utopian’, must then be seen to be
embraced by what Gérard Georges Lemaire called Garouste’s ‘tri-
umph of aesthetic laughter’. Such laughter, however, conscious of the
impact of his ‘poet(h)ics’, as Jean-Claude Pinson might write,9 of un-
certainty, ambivalence, unknowing, draws it strength and that ever
sought ‘wisdom’ of which Garouste speaks, precisely from a sense of
the interconnectedness of things, a fluidity merging the human and the
vegetal, the animal too, the male and the female, collapsing the fron-
tiers otherwise separating mind and matter, dream and rationality,
madness and normality, the sacred and the comical, relishing, in ef-
fect, the stunning porousness of being and doing when one recognises
the indivisibleness of ‘antagonistic truths’,10 the sweet plasticity of the
latter that an art such as Garouste’s chooses to theatricise. When the
artist tells us, in the context of his Vitraux de Notre Dame de Talant,
but his words might apply to any ‘reading’ of (the texts of) the world –
Dante, Villon, Rabelais, any of the ‘sacred’ texts, but, too, the sun, the
night sky, a human face, scene of love or altercation – when, then, Ga-
rouste tells us ‘I have sought to denounce the dangers of exegesis’, we
see to what extent the purposes of his art disconnect from any form of
truth or knowledge not founded on a paradoxical unknowableness, an
embrace of the non-absolute. If Garouste’s figural gesture purports to
some ‘organising of chaos’, such organisation knows itself to be syn-
onymous with an exploration of an antihierarchy of thought and mean-
ing, and, as such, claims nothing but the antipower of ‘truth’ taking
9
See, for example, Pinson’s Habiter en poète (Champ Vallon, 1995).
10
Gérard Georges Lemaire’s expression.
the plastic form of questions ‘vertiginously reiterated’, as Marc Augé

writes.
Where does this leave the ‘meaning’ of Gérard Garouste’s

considerable oeuvre? Unfinished in more ways than one, unfinishable,
ever in some contemplative medias res, ever celebrating itself as pre-
cisely ongoing, indefinable, ever reforming-deforming-transforming,
richly potential, richly absent. Pierre Cabanne has justly written that
Garouste’s is an art ‘where meaning and unmeaning confront each
other or meld’. To seek to ‘read’ the 2003-4 Sein-Gérard, one of the
many Portraits of the period, is to enter once more the pure theatre of
virtual meaning which is yet lived phantasm, swirling desire, plastic-
ally revealed in all its sublime mysteriousness. Le Loup et l’échiquier,
from the same series, parenthetically titled Portrait de Laurent Das-
sault, at best – and, of course, deliberately – gives us meaning’s ludic-
ity, its infinite instability, that same phantasmagoricalness that the
1989-91 etchings, all ‘titled’ Sans titre, endlessly, toyingly, spectrally
stage. Meaning thus positions itself between loss and possibility, eith-
er deemable relative or infinite, and is thus in close affinity with those
psychologemes of melancholia and at times near-mystical exuberance,
madness and wisdom, that lodge themselves in the psychic atmos-
phere of Garouste’s work from its beginnings to its latest productions
such as L’Ânesse et la figue and La Bourgogne, la famille et l’eau
tiède. Such loss, looseness of grip, and simultaneously, an always im-
plicit exultation, that together inform the poetics of meaning in Ga-
rouste, are to be seen, intuited, by way of example, in the two exquis-
ite 1990 Sans titre oils on canvas (the fifth and the sixth) shown in the
Hannover Kunstverein catalogue of 1992. As Marie-José Mondzain
has argued in the context of the Portraits of 2003-4, though it is an
argument globally pertinent to Garouste’s art, ‘the freedom of mean-
ing, the infiniteness of meanings’ in the latter comes from a ‘distribu-
tion of the cards of the possible’. Meaning is thus, in the paintings of
Kezive la ville mensonge, where we might have thought biblical text to
circumscribe and constrain – meaning is shown to be unfixed, endless-
ly choreographable, beyond preestablishment or hierarchy. ‘To banish
paradox, Garouste tells Hortense Lyon, to refuse confusion, ambigui-
ty, multiplicity of meaning is tantamount to allowing oneself to be re-
duced to a passive state, remaining somewhat infantile’. To live the
flux, the ceaseless shifting of the self’s interpretation of its being-
with-others/otherness-in-the-world, an experience eminently central to

the creation of Garouste’s plastic universe, is thus to accept maturely
the giddying, now deeply disturbing, now exhilarating tum-
ultuousness of meaning. The 1984 Nature morte à la femme en bleu
opens our eyes to the infinitely dreamable depths within a scene of
seeming domesticity; the 1982 La Constellation du chien, with its
chromatic power, offers us, as so often, the strange-familiar signif-
icance of human doing glimpsed in its unsituatable, purely symbolic
dramaticalness plunged in turn into the vast inscrutability of ambient
cosmic energies; the truly massive oil on canvas fresco (3.5 x 44m),
Les Rives de l’Eunoé, evoking Garouste’s 1988 work on Dante, La
Divine Comédie, yet also an Indienne, teems with a wealth of cultural
allusion whilst maintaining an at once fantastic and elemental enig-
maticalness in the midst of its swelling pregnancy of intertextuality; or
there is the 1991 oil titled Le Sourcier, with the whirling energies of
dark red-brown or luminous matter in flux and its rough-hewn diviner
one feels to be in search of sources greater, more mysterious yet, than
water. As Jean-Luc Chalumeau has rightly observed, Garouste’s work
deploys its sense of pertinence ‘always between discourses, [it is] as-
sociative, transitory’. Meaning becomes a question[ing] of meaning, a
provocative exploration of its bubbling multiplicity, its ever resilient
withdrawal, its secrecy, an errant tantalisingness far, far in excess of
what we might have idly thought were its mere, banal flagrancies.
WINDOWS UPON THE UNSEEN:
COLETTE DEBLÉ
In the early 1990’s Colette Deblé’s decision ‘to take up the

various representations of woman from prehistory to our own time in
order to produce a visual analysis of the various postures, situations
and stagings’ of the feminine, such a decision foresaw some already
vast and magical 888 works. By 2002, over 2000 works were in exis-
tence, and le spectacle continue.1 It has not by any means been the
sole plastic spectacle Colette Deblé has offered us but it has taken on
significant dimensions and, as we shall shortly see, is in various ways
intimately related to life-long obsessions. If series it is – Philippe
Sénéchal prefers the notion of the kaleidoscope – it bears no particular
global title and has grown spontaneously, nomadically and perhaps
even unstoppably, from its point of original conception. Individual
works, such as Hippolyte Flandrin: La Florentine, with its characte-
ristic delicately transformative and intermingling wash colourings, or
Laurent de la Hyre: Les joueuses de dés,2 with its striking highly se-
lective portrayal of one only of the women players, or, yet again, the
angel-eagle-priestess image of the ancient Sumerian Lilith, such works
may frequently bear no date of personal composition, nor, as with oth-
er works of this immense (un)series, any title other than those details
of the name of the painter or sculptor or photographer cited, his (or,
most rarely, for obvious historical reasons, her) original title, plus,
normally, its date of composition. This citational mode of Colette
Deblé’s is, of course, utterly unliteral, as she has herself stressed, for it
decontextualises in gently stripping away accoutrements and land-
scapes, and thus resituating feminine presence within, as it were, its
strict, uncluttered and concentrated interiority. That said, to cite, as
Jean-Joseph Goux has rightly suggested, reveals a complex agenda of
performance, convocation, judgement. If there is in this great envol
des femmes – it is the title of the book in which Goux’s long essay ap-
1
See Selected Bibliography. No personal website, but certain materials may be
viewed online.
2
I shall, throughout, title Colette Deblé’s works by including, wherever given, the
name of the artist cited.
pears, with, happily, Antoinette Fouque’s publishing house, Des

femmes – if there is, then incontrovertibly, admiration and reverence
in regard to the astonishing range of plastic creativity the history of art
reveals to us, and that Colette Deblé’s own work allows us so fre-
quently to rediscover, to unearth and appreciate in its own light, so is
there equally, subtly, yet pressingly, that ‘visual analysis’, that break-
ing down, that fracturing of the images of art’s past (and, even, pres-
ent), a shrewd prising open of the practice and underlying ‘theory’, or
consciousness, of the relation of the artist to his – almost invariably
his – model: woman. To cite, to summon and critically, analytically,
to perform, let us say, Boucher’s Jeune fille se reposant, this in 1997,
or, in 2002, Poussin’s Vénus, is to do a number of things simulta-
neously: 1. Deblé re-minds, puts us in mind once again, with regard to
great art, its shifting techniques and modal idiosyncrasies; 2. in this,
her work is a highly diversified homage to other artists and the infinite
range of doing and seeing art’s history has unfolded; 3. such a ho-
mage, however, seeks to show, by virtue of what Deblé now omits and
downplays of the original, something of the implicit nature(s) of the
male gaze focussed down the ages on female presence; 4. in this ap-
propriative relation of seer to seen, the plastic passiveness of the mod-
el dovetails seamlessly with the domination of the artist’s perception
and projection; 5. in Deblé’s work the latter effects fall away, are
voided: we are no longer concerned with male imagination, its plea-
sures and indulgences channelled though they so often have been
through matching and innovative rigorous aesthetic discipline; 6.
Deblé thus evokes the gap between subject-artist and object-model, a
gap we may not see in the original, which art’s perfect closing in upon
itself, its own definitiveness, its seeming absoluteness, inevitably oc-
cults; 7. the ‘visual analysis’ we have heard Colette Deblé speak of,
thus sets up a trembling, shimmering between-space, one of erasure,
absence, and creation, new presence; 8. this newness, which is the
work proper of Colette Deblé’s plastic gesture in this vast se-
ries/unseries of paintings, contains, of course, new implicit vision, its
images convey new perceptions, are new projections, and this is ac-
complished in turn by new personal techniques designed to render
palpable such newnesses of vision we may in turn be brought to see in
her work; 9. Deblé has argued the latter constitutes a ‘journal’ and, no
doubt, we may read this not just as a reminder of the quasi-compulsive
dailiness of her démarche, but also as a hint as to the provisionality of
Windows Upon the Unseen: Colette Deblé 31
the latter, its refusal of, perhaps, the very closure any image, as Yves
Bonnefoy will tell us, tends, fatally, to invite us to see in it – it is, per-
haps once again, in this light that the artist likes to see her own work
as akin to those ‘primitive’, knowing-unknowing, sacred-agnostic pro-
jections on the cave walls of Lascaux, and, not dissimilarly, Jacques
Derrida’s insistence on the metaphoricity of Deblé’s use of the lavis,
with its “washing away” and revealing new of new prégnances, new
absent-present fullnesses – such an insistence should not encourage us
to see the prégnances of Colette Deblé’s oeuvre as absolutes, but ra-
ther as what, elsewhere, Derrida has termed ‘remainders’, traces ulti-
mately wrapped in a deferral of their discourse.3
Critics such as Jean-Luc Chalumeau and Michèle Gazier have

sought better to characterise the portrayals of women for which Co-
lette Deblé has opted, either by proposing large groupings – ‘saints,
heroines, martyrs, allegories and mothers’, Chalumeau writes, his oth-
er categories being women as representing social or political power,
women as seducers – all the Eves, Venuses, Suzannes, women as neu-
tral or decorative physical presences – or by listing the real or implicit
roles, activities or circumstances of the women evoked. The problem,
if we can call it that, of such an approach, is that it lays emphasis on
precisely what Deblé erases, implicitly privileging the orig-inal works
rather than Deblé’s transformations which, let me quickly stress, such
critics are yet utterly alert to. What Margarete Zimmermann has called
Deblé’s new ‘Cité des Dames’ or, as Marc Ange Graff writes, her
‘Féminaire’, this clearly is our deeper concern despite the tremblé ef-
fect and Deblé’s muted ode to other art, and this concern takes us far
beyond martyr and virgin (even Mary), beyond goose-herding and
cherry-picking, to something, yes, within the body, physical, sensual,
but ineffable too, of the spirit, of the very mystery of incarnation, an
identity, simply, subtly, to take one’s breath away. For the ‘truth’ or
‘truths’ that such painting unveils remain consciously shadowy, flick-
ering like images in some Japanese theatre, inaugural and sublimely
allusive without the congealments of prophesy or gnosis. A profound
3
Please see Derrida’s essay on Deblé, translated by Andrew Rothwell. For a further
discussion of the notion of the ‘remainder’, see my The Endless Theory of Days. The
Art and Poetry of Gérard Titus-Carmel (Rodopi, 2007), in particular the section de-
voted to Cartouches.
unsaidness, indeed unsayableness, emanates from Deblé’s two diffe-

rently fabricated remakes of Rodin’s celebrated Le Baiser, for exam-
ple, or that of Egon Schiele’s Femme blonde couchée (1914) or again
the transformations wrought upon Jules Machard’s Séléné (5 août
1874, 8 avril 1878). One is reminded of that zone of silence into
which Marguerite Duras’ female protagonist has withdrawn in Le Ra-
visssement de Lol. V. Stein, a withdrawal and an unspeakableness that
yet are a given revelation of some ontological intrinsicalness that,
though beyond language, yet is a maximal, mutely eloquent minimum.
From the museum of muses given us by artists from as far back as
3000 BC – the Idole, Tell Brak Deblé remodels – to Goya’s La Maja
desnuda and Picasso’s Nu de face aux bras levés – we move into that
art of re-musing, a-musing, unmuzzling and analytical visual perusing
that is Colette Deblé’s. An art not resynthesising, if by synthesis one
implies a coherent systematized counter-discourse, though superbly
able, via its own strictly plastic modes, now somewhat ascetic, sub-
dued, now lush, glittering with an original chromatic sensuousness, to
give us an oeuvre of vastly diverse self-concordance and inner harmo-
ny. If, then, the original works chosen by Deblé to be rethought and
remade constitute not just a history of female representation but simul-
taneously a history of plasticity, of art’s materiality, then her contribu-
tion to this continually unfolding story of pure plastic means and
manners must, taking stock alone of the over 2000 paintings created in
this (un)series, be deemed considerable and genially distinctive.
Before moving on to examine issues pertaining to Colette

Deblé’s oeuvre such as autobiography and selflessness, the deep sub-
ject of painting, her conception of art’s feasibilities and aspirations,
and offering along the way, a discussion of the full range of her mod-
es, from her ‘art that is not art’ to her boîtes-fenêtres, her fougères, or
her peauésies – before this, then, it will be useful to query further cer-
tain matters arising from our initial foray into Deblé’s plastic universe.
Much, in effect, may be said to centre around the conception of wom-
an that is Deblé’s and that we may feel can be ours from gazing upon
her work. To move, however, back through the paintings, drawings
and washes of the past nineteen or so years, to the acrylic flowers and
birds, of the early 1990’s and late 1980’s, the acrylics on canvas such
as the various Fougères (1987) or Pacifique modèle (1986) or ‘Please
repeat Agnès’ (1985), and further back still to the boîtes-fenêtres-
dessins of the mid-1970’s, and, finally, to the usually parenthesised or

forgotten ‘non-drawings’ she discusses in depth with Bernard Noël in
Milles fois dedans – to operate this vast visual and mental peregrina-
tion is to realise the full complexity of this conception, hers, as well,
inevitably, as ours. How, for example, shall we conceive what we
have to this point seen as Deblé’s peeling away of the various thick
coatings applied to the female by the male painter, in light of the vari-
ous declarations and avowals made in her 1993 Lumière de l’air,
where we hear her speak of ‘the women of my family [who] seemed
to me so monstrous that, at eleven, I wanted to die’? How shall we
dovetail the desire, manifest in her great (un)series beginning in the
1990’s, to explore the unsaid and the unpainted in the representation
of women – via an art of such delicate unsaying and unpainting –, how
shall we dovetail this with such perception, and moreover, an ongoing
obsession with feminine form – ‘monstrous, enormous, mammalian’,
nothing but ‘an ocean of huge caressing hanging, moving, stifling
breasts’? Just how visceral is what we may think of now as a kind of
purging of female presence of its raw physiology in favour of its vast-
ly overlooked and so often, and today still, as a Calixte Beyala or a
Mariama Bâ will tell us, trampled subtle affectivity and deep spiritual-
ity? Certainly, male representation, in art as elsewhere, explains this,
but what shall we make of the eleven-year-old’s reaction: accultura-
tion? recognition of the female acquiescence in self-images foisted by
male dominance? fear of ‘falling infinitely [into some portrait of un-
happy woman]’, as she writes? Whilst love and tenderness have clear-
ly been major factors in Colette Deblé’s life experience – I shall return
to this ultimately –, the reality/metaphor of ‘penetration’ she can rea-
dily generalise, both positively and negatively. Penetration is what our
senses do, our sight especially, it allows a movement towards the oth-
er, an entry into his, her or its universe, a convergence, a fusion of
sorts; but, too, such penetration may constitute intrusion, an exploita-
tion, a violation even, of our openness, our perhaps sensed exposure
and vulnerability. It is easy to sense the impact such equations may
have upon Deblé’s conception of woman, the complexities it may
generate and that bury themselves not just, moreover, in the work on
the ‘representations of woman [in art], the various postures, situations,
stagings’ that are (not truly) hers, but, too, in Deblé’s portrayal of
flowers understood to be the plant’s sexual organs, in her Fougères
and other acrylics where self-portraiture is at stake, and, of course, in
those neither erotic nor pornographic, she argues, ‘non-drawings’ that

yet remain so striking and which we are offered in Mille fois dedans.
And, we may ask ourselves, our eyes flitting over her work of a life-
time, is not all of this, with the issues of identity it implies and the
‘unthinkable’ logic of the body hovering about it, somehow tied into
Colette Deblé’s perception-conception of what can, and cannot, be
held to be beautiful? Certainly, she tells Bernard Noël, there was a
time when aestheticism was felt to open the ‘gate to all and every
complacency’: it was that trap of the pure, idealised image that could
so easily mask one’s experience of the real, of Bonnefoy’s ‘presence’,
one may assume – and which he himself thus feels compelled, in an
intitial gesture, to ‘trample’ and ‘destroy’. Beauty, thus seen, is a
temptation to be resisted, and one may feel that many a painting –
Goya’s La Maja desnuda, say, or Gleyre’s Vénus Pandémos, Fantin-
Latour’s L’Or du Rhin or even, just possibly, Flandrin’s La Florentine
– Deblé takes up and modifies, was, in the original, an aesthetic self-
indulgence, an extravagant phantasm. She adds, however, that she
now ‘accept[s] the risk of beauty’, no doubt sensing its natural right to
be recognised and even, possibly, understanding its infinite range, its
indefinableness, its capacity to reveal itself in the fragmented, the par-
tial, seemingly the imperfect, conceivably Baudelairian ‘ugliness’, her
own ‘monstrousness’ – in brief, not merely in what we may deem to
be perfect form, but in all that is, all of being’s, and doing’s, infinite
forms.4 This, of course, would ally itself to that logic of fusion, undif-
ferentiation, aesthetico-spiritual deferral I shall come back to. And
perhaps we can see it in her ‘remakes’ of the Anonyme: Vénus (II-III
siècles) or the Béotie, terre cuite archaïque, where we are far from the
curvaceous and harmoniously balanced forms that Deblé’s Yoshiko
Ishikawa: Larmes d’amour (2004) yet continues, acceptingly, if I can
thus echo Deblé’s nuance, to render most manifest.
The question of feminism inevitably arises in an oeuvre be-

ginning with the ‘non-drawings’ of Mille fois dedans and reaching a
4
As Thoreau has suggested somewhere, ‘the perception of beauty is a moral test’.
One may see it therefore as requiring a traversal of its visibleness, a penetration of
form and a ‘visionary’ experience of invisibleness, of unmaskedness, that full and
awing mystery of total beingness. All great art moves in the direction of an embrace
of existential contradiction and contrast. One may think of, say, work as diverse as
that of Gabriel Garcia Márquez or that of the Indian poet A.K.Ramanujan.
present climax with the 2000-plus works devoted to, yet radically
modifying, art’s historic representation of women. Just to what degree
can we attach to Colette Deblé’s painting the abiological logic of a
Simone de Beauvoir, the reclaiming of the ghoulish in a Mary Daly,
Luce Irigaray’s uncovering of the sociologico-philosophical discourse
that falsely images the feminine, Assia Djebar’s struggle to free wom-
en from the severe feudalities that still men can persist in imposing,
Monique Wittig’s ‘guerrilla’ war that the Manastabal of Virgile, non
suggests is better transformed into an ‘active passion’ rather than an
haranguing? Claude and Françoise Lelièvre have seen in Deblé’s work
on the representation of women a vast ‘political allegory’, and it is not
difficult to adhere to such thinking, although Deblé herself wonders to
what extent ‘women can remain an allegory when a woman is the
painter: when it is a woman painter who is re-drawing [woman] and
re-designating her’. Chalumeau terms Colette Deblé’s art a maieutic
art, a subtle Socratic art, we may see it as, ever questioning so as to
give birth in the other to his or her unconscious, to date veiled and bu-
ried, thinking – with respect to women, that is. In that sense the femi-
nineness/feminism of work such as the Oeuvre d’un proche de Prima-
tice: Enlèvement d’Hélène or the peauésie titled Lydia Harambourg:
Surprise par le regard d’Actéon usurps the usual masculine domin-
ance and becomes the force, as Goux writes, that ‘marks, [...], insemi-
nates, [...] informs, impos[ing] upon the virginalness of the support the
figures of its graphic design[ation]’. This said, never can we maintain
that Colette Deblé’s art, from beginning to end, seeks a re-repre-
sentation offering fixed, categorical, ideologised, or even somewhat
stably philosophical or sociologised conceptualisation. Hers is an oeu-
vre that queries, wonders, avoids self-theorisation, sensing deep ele-
mental strangeness, paradoxes and mysteries at the heart of that onto-
logical knot only an individuated woman can both tie, with her own
beingness, and, sometimes, unravel to experience its pure, liberated
unsayableness. Even, surely, an early (1976) boîte-fenêtre-dessin such
as that accompanying Goux`s fine essay of 2006, and despite its see-
mingly utterly un-remadeness – surely even such a creation subtly
hints at the profound enigma lying beneath thick layerings that mask
the deep, as yet undiscovered, other realness that is this, and perhaps
somewhere, every woman’s.
That Colette Deblé’s oeuvre, despite its ‘disappearance’ into

its own strict plastic interiority, rides on a myriad of issues of self-
identity and autobiographical pertinence – autobiography: the graphic
display of the body, the bios, of the self – is disputed neither by the
artist herself nor by her major commentator, Jean-Joseph Goux. To
read the two early interviews with Bernard Noël is to be mightily
struck by the at once visceral and spiritual dimension of her poiein,
her creativity, even though she dismisses, despite Noël’s shaky half-
protest, the latter’s product as aesthetically non-achieving, inabouti,
non-art. The various Fougères or similar works of a slightly later per-
iod such as Voir (1991), operate a kind of mise en abyme involving the
somewhat veiled self’s gaze turned upon equally veiled others, this
through a separating yet possibilising window, that, implicitly, of art
itself, an art seeking, gazing, penetrating, half-revealing. And, inevita-
bly, for the viewer of, say, Deblé’s magnificent 2002 Philippe de
Champaigne: Le Ravissement de Sainte Madeleine – painted twice, as
if a double-take were, as indeed it may be deemed to be, as necessary
as if we were reading Duras’ already evoked unravellable Ravishing of
Lol Stein – how can we not be sensitive to Deblé’s statement that see-
ing is always, somehow, a seeing of self. So that painting, as well as
the ultimate display of its product, in galleries and museums, becomes
fatally that act of self-exhibition that so obsesses Deblé – an act at
once indiscreet, showing the hidden, what ‘ought not to be seen’, as
she writes in Colette Deblé. Défloraisons, yet, equally, intensely ap-
propriate, for, though it exposes the secret, the normally unconfessed
– a logic running all the way through her work – such deliberately dis-
turbing exposure is coextensive with an exhibition, as she says, of a
‘love of painting’, and, of course, its complicatedly caressive act. A
deeply affecting ‘act of presence’, in effect, that equally reveals ‘my
absence in death’s beyond’. It is indisputable, of course, that the non-
drawings of Mille fois dedans exhibit the drawn body of self, but it is
essential, I believe, to respect Colette Deblé’s strictly artistic disavow-
al of them – precisely to the degree that the secrets they may be said to
reveal are not of the order of those central to her aesthetico-spiritual
sensibility, which allows , as she powerfully tells us, to ‘show what
one cannot see: /the absence of God / the jubilation of living / the ris-
ing of sap / the energy of time / the emotion of light’. Certainly, these
non-drawings imply an insistent discourse on self, its self-violation,
via a phantasmatic distortion; certainly, there is the will to expel ‘the
intolerable’, to overcome the trauma of viewing pornographic images,

and perhaps even – at Noël’s insistence – confess to a drawing-as-
masturbation, a strange self-avoidance, and yet an embrace of the ma-
nifest ambiguities swarming within. But it remains that, auto-bio-
graphical as these non-drawings are, they cannot, for Colette Deblé,
constitute the art she already knows to be burgeoning within her, in its
no less complex true recognisableness.
An aesthetically and spiritually critical divide, an honestly

embraced paradoxicality within, can thus be said to be borne in upon
Colette Deblé’s consciousness of her doing, her plastic démarche. She
can speak of the received notion of the ‘sin’ of feminine hair, of feel-
ings of guilt in connection with desires beyond thought or reason,
purely of the bios. And she muses as to the relationship of desire to
the ‘body of the other’, even to the point of looking through one (fe-
male) body ‘in order to see another’. And at all moments there re-
mains in her consciousness – her conscience, too, to the extent that an
ethics may be said to merge with/emerge from her aesthetics – that at
once troubling yet, at moments, exhilarating equation: seeing = seeing
self. Seeing her own mother’s exposed sex, however, sends the child-
artist scurrying off to draw in the sand so as to bury the image, as
Deblé tells us in all simplicity in Lumière de l’air. And if the sexual
organs of the many women she depicts/remakes, from the early boîtes-
fenêtres to works such as Camille Claudel: La Vague or Anonyme:
Néréide, Égypte, VIe, or even, Egon Schiele: Femme blonde couchée
(1914), lose their physiological blatancy in a larger meditative em-
brace of the presence and the body of woman – ‘I draw the women of
my intimate heaven’, she can tell us –, yet can she see herself, she
maintains, like those women portrayed by Otto Dix. Complex, ten-
sional, unidealised, raw even, and so very mortal. So that there ever
remains the risk of ‘falling infinitely’ into some (self-)portrait, some
(self-)seeing of the ‘unhappy woman’. It is, yet, but a risk, in what
Goux, Deblé herself in agreement, rightly sees as a search, visible in
many forms – the flowers and bird paintings, the Fougères, the great
ongoing unseries re-presenting women’s presence-in-the-world, but,
too, I should argue, even in the non-drawings of Mille fois dedans –
for ‘absolute origin’, a ‘lost universe [painting points to]’. And, as
elsewhere in the ontology of Deblé’s vision, it is a search revealing a
fundamental paradox. A paradox beyond its capacity for generating
‘happiness’ where an infinite fall into its opposite threatens, a paradox

that, then, beyond the dysphoric, can, in the instant of the painting,
allow euphoria, the brief ‘utopia [of] stepping outside of selfness’ –
when we thought, as did Deblé, that all was contained therein. To
gaze, then, upon her beautiful 1990 Pacifique modèle, does it allow
some utopian access to a ‘lost world’ of fusion, Oneness, where self is
dissipated into a vastness of mutual embrace? The rain of light partial-
ly obliterating the seen, does it allow for a penetration into something
of that ‘original world’, as she calls it, perhaps that ‘absolute origin’ of
Goux, where the bathing naked self and the foaming sea, the illumi-
nated sand and sky and earth merge in some strangely visible ‘invisi-
bleness’ beyond any narrow selfness of their seeming, and lived, iden-
titites? We may, indeed, think so, for much in Colette Deblé’s plastic
work is of the ineffable, and her sparse but thoughtful observations on
such work would delicately induce such thinking.
Visual analysis of the visual theatre of art’s history of repre-

sentation of the feminine we have seen to be the principle focus of Co-
lette Deblé’s most recent, and major, plastic project. An exploration of
questions of perception and image, in effect, ‘by plastic means only’,
she clarifies. And, it is important to notice, this exploration extends,
not just to works such as Poussin: Enlèvement des Sabines (1998), but
right back to the non-drawings of Mille fois dedans (where her own
produced images and the perceptual power behind them in relation to
her conception of what art somehow must be are precisely queried),
through the work on the boîte-fenêtre-dessin (where grills and mirrors
complexify seeing and the seeable and demand we witness such com-
plexifications), to the very fine large acrylic Voir, already evoked (and
clearly wrestling, we might reasonably think, with plasticity`s very
capacity to visualise anything at all). Such an art thus explores and
moves with, yet beyond, history and even the history of art’s represen-
tations, and the reason for this is clearly Colette Deblé’s understand-
ing of the deep subject of painting. Goux nicely points to this in con-
templating the Fougères and similar canvases, noting that there is a
‘secret meteorology’ at play, reminding us that it is not so much ‘rain-
ing’ – it is raining paint, the impersonal il peint parenthetically con-
veying something of that tensionality of which I have spoken thrusting
auto-bio-graphy up against transcendence of selfness. To look at Ilys
(1991) or Pirat (1991), both acrylic on canvas flowers, is to appreciate
that mimesis is not truly an issue: the emergence of a plastic materiali-

ty supercedes. Similarly, in, purely by way of example, the Hans
Memling: Maria Portinari, (vers 1470) wash, whilst refocusing via an
elimination that re-agendas, Deblé perhaps above all shows us that,
indeed, the most striking element of this work is its offering to us of
painting qua painting – the work within the work, the subject of the
work, that is its art, its material workedness. Deblé, speaking of her
portrayals of flowers - one could draw attention to her exquisite acryl-
ic Thésa –, writes as follows: ‘The subject is painting’s alibi; it is its
air, both the appearance it gives itself and the air in which painting
breathes’. In short, the real subject of painting is painting. The differ-
ent peauésies (de l’Adour: Colette Deblé’s address) - let us have in
mind, by way of example, the lovely Surprise par le regard d’Actéon,
done with Lydia Harambourg’s text – are alibis for a shared poeticity,
a shared poiein, that far transcends anything flatly discursive, binding-
ly ideational and, most certainly, sociopolitical, that we may seek to
attach to them: the gaze of Acteon is, ultimately, ‘that of painting’ it-
self. And ‘for what image?’: the question no doubt can only receive an
infinity of responses. Colette Deblé, once more from the early days of
Mille fois dedans – and she will forgive me for dipping so frequently
into a (yet crucial, seminal) conversation about ‘non-art’ – shows a
deep, and just, fascination with the ‘invisibleness’, as she puts it, of
what is drawn or painted, a ‘mental’ dimension beyond art’s forms yet
experienced through the latter.5 Art’s surface subject matter, Acteon,
let us say, or the carrying off of the Sabine women, and, further, the
embedded subjectivity of self-investment in such matter, neither can
obviate the pure, quasi-anonymous sublimeness that the painting qua
painting exudes. It is this sublimity that is the invisibleness Deblé has
in mind. When she tells us that, ‘in a painting, my happiness [is] to be
the waves, [etc.]’; when she tells us that she is then what she sees, that
she becomes, her being is, painting, we must appreciate that this be-
coming, this being, is of the order of the invisibleness that so haunts
her. To feel, as she adds, still in Lumière de l’air, ‘the weight of
[painting’s] colour making and unmaking the image’, the seeableness
of a painting, is to enter the realm of the ‘unlimited’, to experience its
spiritual, ontological unseeableness. Take, for example, the wash im-
5
‘I have drawn the invisible’, she says in Mille fois dedans; and, in Lumière de l’air,
she speaks of the ‘analogy between the space of the visual and that of the mental’.
ages offered us, in Femmes contées, of Marguerite de Valois or Louise

Michel: neither are pinned down by what we know of these two cele-
brated women, we are moved beyond the vis-ible; rational ‘visual
analysis’, whilst eminently feasible, and deployed and invited, equally
slips away as we enter the strangeness of plasticity’s pure intrinsical-
ness and the unsayable world and ontos hovering about these superbly
shadowy unrepresentations. And, similarly, Colette Deblé’s ever so
delicate Cithariste, (Villa de Publius Fannius Synistor) leaps beyond
painting’s flat, though endless speakableness to invite our investment
of a non-space and a non-time buried in the ineffable invisibleness the
painting’s speckled washed hues, its ambient spotting and its pure rose
absences nevertheless guarantee.
The materials, the techniques and modes of production of Co-

lette Deblé’s art are relatively classic, though the manners to which
they are made to apply themselves have various discreet elements of
originality. We are far – let us consider some contemporary women
artists initially – from the bullet-riddled beginnings of Niki de Saint
Phalle’s work, far too from her early oils on plywood such as Scor-
pion and Stag crammed with tiny objects, fragments of china and cof-
fee beans, perhaps in sympathy with the great Nanas that will emerge,
even though, in pure plastic terms, the latter do not coincide with
Deblé’s delicate washes, acrylics and use of coloured pigments. We
are, of course, no less far from the constituent matter and modes of
plastic fabrication manifest in Louise Bourgeois’ or Annette Messag-
er’s work, despite their penchant for drawing: no plaster or marble
limbs, no vast installations wrapping the viewer round in the teeming,
suffo-cating clutter of endless glass, stone, metal or cloth objects,
found or hand-crafted. Geneviève Asse may demand of herself a clas-
sical, though modernly abstractive use of canvas and paint, and there
is great subtlety, as we shall soon see, in her plastic modulation, but
there is none of the lightness, the quick sprightliness to be found in
Deblé’s ultimately preferred mode, the lavis, with its very different
conceived values.6 Needless to say, though the (complex) logic of
self-exhibition at the heart of Sophie Calle’s work is no doubt of per-
tinence and interest in contemplating the démarche of Colette Deblé,
photography, film, the literal staging of the self’s body and presence,
6
Please see infra for an analysis of Geneviève Asse’s oeuvre.
the flagrancy of interaction with the other, none of such modes of en-
gendering plasticity – filmic or photographic traces – are those to
which Deblé applies herself.7 And, if, too, the materials and modes of
production at play in certain works by Danièle Perronne – to which we
shall so soon offer our attention – works such as her boîtes or her as
yet unexhibited journal with its at times delicate use of watercolour –
if, there, echoes may be found, as also in her use of acrylics in the
canvases Bernard Noël and Pierre Garnier have rightly lauded, yet
does the art, qua art, materially and processually, of Colette Deblé
continue to not readily dovetail with that of her contemporaries.8 I
shall not dwell on the distinctiveness that becomes apparent if we con-
trast matter and technique, process and plastic product, of Deblé with
those of Ben Vautier or Jean-Pierre Pincemin, or even the painting
alone of a François Morellet, a Gérard Garouste, a Martial Raysse or a
Claude Viallat. To the extent that Alexandre Hollan often privileges
gouaches, watercolours and acrylics, clearly there are modal affinities
at play with Deblé’s material processes, and Gérard Titus-Carmel’s
large arsenal equally, almost inevitably, contains various of the subtle
elements of plastic fabrication developed by Deblé.9 But then, before
turning our final attention to a consideration of the global logic under-
pinning Colette Deblé’s work, let us visit, compactly, of necessity, the
full range of her production to better appreciate something of the spe-
cificities of its material, technical modalities.
And, to begin more or less at the beginning, those trouble-

some ‘non-drawings’ of Mille fois dedans. ‘Pictographs’, Deblé terms
them, line drawings altogether too readable to warrant in her eyes the
label of art; drawings offering a distortion of the real, of real sexual
feasibility, and therefore marking an ‘impossibleness [...] of complete
communication’ and, more importantly, though ambiguously, a refusal
to see what perhaps yet she desired to see. Simple, stark lines, with
darkly or les flagrantly shaded and coloured sections marking sexual
7
For an analysis of the work of Niki de Saint Phalle, of Annette Messager, of Louise
Bourgeois and of Sophie Calle, the reader may consult my Contemporary French Art
1 (Rodopi, 2008).
8
Please see infra for a discussion of Danièle Perronne’s work.
9
All of these artists, along with others, are examined in either volume 1 or volume 2
of Contemporary French Art.
organs (usually the penis) or limbs, hands, feet, hair. Drawings/non-

drawings produced in a matter of a few days and, perhaps tellingly,
almost never in the two interviews with Bernard Noël, occasioning
discussion of the strictly material, plastic dimension of their fabrica-
tion and reality. The boîtes-fenêtres-dessins, begun a couple of years
later, and bearing no distinguishing (sub-)titles, do, however, draw
some consideration. Jean-Luc Chalumeau is particularly taken with
the intricacy both of such work as work and of its conceptualisation.
In the 1977 catalogue to the exhibition Mythologies quotidiennes II at
the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, Colette Deblé waxes
eloquent: ‘Inside, what passes by – dailiness. The very thing one
would like to firmly grasp and which, seized, would become mytho-
logical. The window is at once frame and transformer. No centre, just
sides: a tomb, thrown wide open’. Later, in Lumière de l’air, she adds:
‘In my boîtes, space multiplies and contracts as in one’s mind, but the
inside of the boîte is an outside, in which the use of a mirror-paper re-
flects both the inside (the back of the drawing) and the outside (the
viewer caught in his or her own gazing’.
From the fine drawings and ‘sculpted’ assemblages of the

boîtes-fenêtres-dessins to the thirty-three acrylics on canvassed frame
of the 1987 Fougères series, “a difference” as Michel Deguy writes of
the passage from his Poèmes de la presqu’île to his Biefs, and on the
surface a radical one. From material and chromatic sobriety Deblé
moves to a sensuous explosion of multicoloured paint. If, as Yves
Bonnefoy suggests, Gérard Titus-Carmel’s own shift from graphic
starkness to colour and the vegetal forms such colour inscribes, can be
said to constitute something of a return from form and its concepts to
the experience of ‘presence’,10 then the vibrant Fougères, it may be
argued, plunge into the ontic fullness such a significant aesthetic
modulation implies. Colette Deblé speaks of such a quasi-idyllic im-
mersion ‘in the nostalgia of the time when one had time and when
body and nature knew one another’. Pleasure, fusion, love are the
terms used to describe such experience and, if Deblé still clings to the
conceptualisations that would link the Fougères work to the boîtes-
fenêtres-dessins – ‘Fougères [..] is, too, the character of a novel of
10
See Bonnefoy’s essay in Feuillées (Le Temps qu’il fait, 2004).
mirrors [...] Mirror window, mirror character’ – she deems this new
work to be in the tradition of Bonnard and others ‘of my country’:
‘painters of the happiness of living, of the happiness of painting’.
Such inseparable joys of pure plasticity, vibrant acrylic chromatics
and life’s, the body’s, the mind’s, exhilaration in pure doing, in being
this doing, this poiein, can readily be seen to continue in the diversif-
ications offered in pseudo-fougères, if I may express myself in that
way, such as the 1991 Thésa or Bao or the Sans titre of the same year.
Bird paintings such as Rieuses give us transparency, a pristine, almost
childlike elementariness, vaguely reminiscent of Braque but with
sharper images, some clinging to the real, others, the majority, impres-
sionistic, reduced to basic forms, and ever dominated by the sky-blue
paint in whose medium they move and float. The flowers are more
luscious, sensual, even sexual à la Georgia O’Keefe. They overflow
the canvas; there is no effort to isolate blooms in some traditional re-
presentational fashion, as, for example, in Monet’s Fleurs dans un
vase de cristal. Certainly, these are flowers – far more so than Dali’s
Flowers for Gala or Picasso’s truly and delightfully ‘infantile’ 1961
Fleurs –, but, as Jean-Luc Chalumeau so rightly says, their deep iden-
tity is ‘simply painting’. The term défloraisons has been used, and
accepted by Colette Deblé herself, in free reference not to just such
flower works, but also implicitly to the major work to come on the
representation of women. Its value therefore becomes multiple, but in
all cases reminds us of the primacy of painting, the lure and fallacy of
a figur-ation seeking directly to designate, and thus limit, the real. All
of the elements of technique and conception that will come to charac-
terise the 2000 and more works on women – omission, undetailedness,
fragmentation, incompletion, erasure, simplification, non-contex-
tualisation, blurring, speckling, and so on – can be seen to be at play
in one way or another in the 1985-91 works from Fougères to Fleurs.
Women disappear in order to reappear; their male floralness is deflo-
wered to make room for the new, ‘washed’ and unnamed, de-named
grace and subtlety of a femaleness perhaps unsayable. The Peauésies
de l’Adour continue Deblé’s work on what we might see as the secret,
unspoken and, at root, unspeakable ontology of women, but the many
works of the, to date, three series, go further in embracing not only the
other of woman, but also the other that is the writer, whose text is seen
not just as readable material but also, even primarily, as a visual phe-
nomenon whereby hand-writing somehow fuses with hand-painting.
Writers such as Claire Malroux, Salah Stétié, Régine Detambel, Mi-

chel Butor, Jean Baudrillard, Jacques Dupin and Isabelle Rome –
some seventy or so, as I write – have thus collab-orated with Deblé in
this creative dovetailing of poetry and painted skin-like paper offering
extremely limited and delicate manuscripts. Such work, in turn, may
be presented as livres d’artiste in very varyingly limited editions. ‘I
like those love stories à trois, Deblé tells us, between author, publisher
and painter, stories that involve the recognition of the work of the oth-
er, making it live and exist, inscribing it in the logic of time that grows
and flowers within a book’. Artisanal work, hand-crafted, ever unique,
organic, rooted in the impulse to join, to cocreate, the fleshy and men-
tal ‘externalised experience’ of relative fusion and a ‘movement [that]
is meaning’.
In Lumière de l’air Colette Deblé calls to our attention the

most curious paradox of giving oneself over to an activity that, taking
the vastness of one’s experience of reality, yet metamorphoses such
immensity into ‘a few bits of colour’. In conclusion of this study of an
oeuvre spanning some thirty-five years I should like to offer a few
compact observations on this paradox, its improbable sense, the fun-
damental logic behind Deblé’s art that allows such seeming reductive-
ness to swell with pertinence. I shall proceed, as from time to time
elsewhere, and out of felt necessity, in point form:
1: if Deblé can maintain that ‘the only question for the painter
is what did s/he see’, and if all art may be deemed, as critics
such as Dominique Grandmont as well as Deblé herself sug-
gest, a window upon being – including the sex organs, she
will not, and of course rightly, hesitate to emphasise in Mille
fois dedans – then we must equally be alert to her sense of the
problematics of seeing as we gaze through the endless win-
dows opening without and within;
2: in effect, to gaze is to see only a certain available visible-

ness, hence the limits of representation, the sought glimpsing,
at once physiological and mental, of being’s deeper subtleties,
the sense that painting occurs in order to see ‘what one cannot
see’, as Deblé writes in Défloraisons – it is thus not surprising
that:
3: Jean-Joseph Goux can speak of a painterly logic that is

entr’optique ou alléloscopique, the sightings of the eye behind
painting’s gesture finding themselves ever between, in con-
flictual reciprocity, in a sense in a no-(wo)man’s land, that yet
is at the heart of an unsituatable, unrepresentable being – it is
no wonder that Deblé can be led to say that ‘my hand works
blind’;
4: it is in this way that art, in exceeding, or receding from, the

blatancies of the visible that yet fascinate and call to us, may
accede to its, for Colette Deblé, required ‘mythologicalness’,
its capacity to transcend particularity whilst emerging from it
– the artist thus becomes not the reproducer of the real, but the
latter’s mythographer, exploring beyond the describable, the
finite, seeking to sense the limitless: ‘the ocean, the desert,
painting’, Deblé so aptly writes, in a perfect tautology;
5: such a logic of the plastic, of poiein, implies a liberation

lived as a release from, firstly, what may be felt as the con-
straining identity of self (all the way from self-dislike to nar-
cissism), and, secondly, the seeming already- saidness of the
real – again, a release into the infinite unsayable-
ness/recreatableness of all that is – is, that is, in its ever un-
folding, unfoldable mystery, in all that ever remains, as Bon-
nefoy has written, ‘in excess of the sign’;
6: undoubtedly, for Colette Deblé, art, potentially, momentari-

ly at least, may offer the sense of fusion, the experience of
love and happiness she has never stopped speaking of in its
connection: art’s purpose is then spiritual, psychological,
close to ethical in that it suggests modes of (self-)perception
allowing a revaluing of the being of self, of other, of all that,
given its penetration of the consciousness of the painting-
doing-re-doing self, only seems other, but is, in effect, flower,
bird, light, colour, woman, text of the other, etc, etc, endlessly
fusable, mergeable, with self and its (non-)otherness in that

‘liquid unity’ her art dreams of;11
7: designare, a verb, an action, giving for Deblé, simulta-

neously, interchangeably, dessin and dessein: art, that is, in-
trinsically coextensive with purpose, containing its own exis-
tential, ontic, logic – and miming, in effect, the deep, perhaps
strange, even blinding purpose at the heart of all doing, all
(self-)fabrication –, art, beyond its doubts which certainly can
arise for Deblé, ever pointing to, designating, the value, the
faceless, ‘mythological’ pertinence of its own mystery, its ‘si-
lence’ which is, as Derrida writes, a prégnance, a presence
and a future, ever, as Christian Gabrielle Guez-Ricord has
suggested, mediating, ever metamorphosing. An art by design,
by self-designation, brimming with a purpose it alone speaks,
beyond words.
11
Perhaps at best the final product of art may lead to a certain satisfaction, but the
relaunching of desire, predicated, as René Char and Pierre Reverdy have argued, on
the return of felt lack, absence, emptiness, suggests that the happiness of fusion dep-
ends not upon ‘product’, the producedness of art, but rather upon process, continuity,
the unfinishable theoria of poiein.
THE LIGHT OF DEATH, A SACREDNESS
OF DOING: GEORGES ROUSSE
In 1981 Georges Rousse set up a pseudo-studio in an aban-

doned warehouse and proceeded to create a work of photographic
traces called, with extreme unpretentiousness, Entrepôt Vichy. Behind,
and supporting, such residual photographic traces, lie two equally sig-
nificant phenomena: the original space now occupied, ‘invaded’ Coc-
teau liked to think of all artistic intervention (seeing it very far from
the ‘evasion’ many may deem at the centre of art’s practice), and the
painting investing, covering, half-covering, the sordid realness of the
derelict, the degraded human createdness let go and now seized hold
of at the very point of its final ruin, rethought, re-injected with another
human creation: a wild, improbable painting of walls and staircases,
offering them life, human figures no less, where death and humanity
seemed to have deserted them. ‘Reassuring and worrisome’, Philippe
Piguet characterises such a gesture: reassuring, no doubt, precisely for
its reanimation of the moribund, its caress of the leprous, its bold re-
turn of colour and dynamic figuration to the drab and the inert, its leap
out of the filth into the ultimate ‘hygiene’ of photography;1 worri-
some, it is safe to say, because, above all, such spaces entail risk of a
varying nature for the solitary adventurer. ‘Jubilation’, as Rousse tells
us, ‘before the wall’, yes; but, too, physical vulnerability, the sheer
rawness confronting one’s doing, materially and climatalogically.
And, in all of this, and lest we think that Rousse’s gesture constitutes a
rebellious embrace of ‘bad painting’, we should remember that here
we have an artist never forgetful rather, as he tells Jocelyne Lupien, of
the insertion of his own faire, his own ‘doing’, within the great and
1
The notion of ‘hygiene’ can more broadly be taken as applicable to a logic whereby
all art may be deemed to abstract itself from the intense lived immediacy of existence,
its ‘mal’, its suffering, its violent contrastiveness, its rawness, establishing via this
Baudelairian and Mallarméan idealisation, an ‘inner’ purity and an untouchable beau-
ty over and above any tiresome earthy referentiality that may linger.
long tradition of art, from El Greco and Géricault to Matisse and Pi-
casso.2
Let us take a look at a couple of other works as we ease our

way into a plastic universe on the surface so very different from that
of, say, a Gérard Garouste, a Martial Raysse or a Geneviève Asse: the
2003 Varsovie series, firstly, then the 1992 Bratislava works, followed
by the 1999 Miyota photographic ensemble. Like all of Rousse’s
work, Varsovie offers a collection of photographs sandwiched be-
tween, but spilling out from, given place and painterly and/or architec-
tural intervention in, on, and with, such givenness. The Warsaw pho-
tographs catapult us into a different mode of Rousse’s poiein, project-
ing onto the real, geometric volumes at once illusory, perfect trompe-
l’oeil creations, and yet ‘volumes’ – rectangles, triangles, squares of
brilliant colour – staring back at us from the glossy surfaces of the
photograph’s own magical, yet in a sense, no less real thereness – with
what Piguet terms ‘the brilliance of something evident’. Subtle or lu-
minously stark effects are thus produced with a corresponding var-
iance of aesthetic, emotional and, most broadly for Rousse, spiritual
values, as meticulously calculated ‘perspectival’ painting and architec-
tural transformation combine to cast into ambient space the illusion of
autonomous yet integrated forms and volumes we can appreciate as
‘impossible’, just as, at the same time, we can puzzle over their crea-
tion – having, I stress, at our disposal only the photographic trace, the
treated, nomadically occupied given space having since returned to its
crumbling anonymity or its complete destruction. The 1992 Bratislava
work focuses upon the conjunction of language and presence, place
and its potential sacredness, the temple-like nature of a large single
letter and bare urban construct, the metaphysics of artistic, poetic-
poietic inhabitation and the simplicity of deserted cell-like interior
space. All of this working through the Reverdyan logic and experience
of self-world-art-word relationship, their potential, but fleeting ‘con-
substantiation’ – as Reverdy liked to put it, speaking of his own ges-
ture, or Braque’s, Gargallo’s, Matisse’s, Léger’s.3 Georges Rousse
2
See Selected Bibliography. Consult also the artist’s excellent personal website:
www.georgesrousse.com.
3
See Reverdy’s Note éternelle du présent (Flammarion, 1973) and Nord-Sud, Self-
Defence et autres écrits sur l’art et la poésie (Flammarion, 1975).
The Light of Death, a Sacredness of Doing: Georges Rousse 49
tells us he discovered space and emptiness via his walks in the coun-
try. His urban art, however – and again I appeal to Reverdy – facing
itself with the depletion and quasi-nullness of the abandoned, seeks to
‘fill the void’ of emptied beingness with the poiein, the doing, of art’s
own, new and temporarily renewing ontic investment. Endlessly, from
place to place, in an unfinishable gesture of ontic achievement. Miyo-
ta (1999), whilst predicated upon a globally similar poetics, further
develops new means and strategies, most notably those involved in his
conceptualisation and practice of the ring or circle architecturally and
perspectivally generative of a tunnel effect, wonderfully centred here
upon the desire to telescope and merge inside space and outside space.
Whilst the latter retains its pristine givenness (: a white bridge-cum-
platform, water and reflected light, evergreens and bare though deli-
cately hued deciduous branches, sky, varyingly lit), the inside space
bears the many faces of Rousse’s exquisitely structured formal and
chromatic harmonies that leave us in awe of his shifting vision and the
patient labour required for the latter’s realisation via the residual pho-
tographic traces finally offered in their utmost discretion, their serene-
ness, their remarkable capacity to plunge us into, now a vaguely mon-
astic atmospherics, now some hypermodernity of hardly imaginable
space.
Let us look more closely at certain aspects of the logic of

place and space in Georges Rousse’s artistic practice – this, before
proceeding to a consideration of the role of light and the poetics of
photography, of Rousse’s characteristic processes and protocols, of
questions of perception, image and presence, of the complexities of
purpose and motivation, of, finally, the nature of that ‘spirituality I
should like to confer upon abandoned places without there being any
link with a particular religion’. I shall be compact in detailing factors
pertinent to the conception and experience of place:
1: Rousse selects the places that will become his temporary

studios for works assuming their name, now Nice (1984), now
San Diego (1999), now Bretigny (1994): this is not as unusual
as it may seem initially: painters as different as Michelangelo
or Daniel Buren, sculptors such as Bernard Pagès, installation
artists like Annette Messager or Sophie Calle, all can shift
nomadically their centre of creative production according to
desire and opportunity;
2: within such chosen place, Rousse then further selects spe-

cific spaces that coincide with some pure visceral impulse or
else some geometric-aesthetic vision of their plastic transmu-
tation and resultant photographic trace;
3: the ‘space mythomaniac’ that Rousse deems himself, smi-

lingly, to be, tends quasi-exclusively to opt for derelict, gro-
tesque, ruined place, place that has maximal potential for
transformation via plastic intervention: an-xiety, danger, any
funerary atmosphere associated with such dubious place is
offset by the sense of creative freedom available, by a solitude
affording deep reflection upon the relation of self – body and
mind – to world and human gesture, past and immediate;4
4: the ‘void’ of space that once was living, inhabited, dynam-

ic, is thus thrust up against the initial ‘void’ of doing’s,
poiein’s desire: being-in-space/place thus urges a confronta-
tion with meaning and purpose, those of others, then those of
self, now;
5: place, in consequence of this, is lived by Rousse at once as

a container of pure matter returning to its intrinsicalness, and
as a space ever inviting human relation to it, action in and
with it, cocreation, let us say;
6: to immerse the self in place implies a connection with the

genius loci of, say, the Abbaye de Fontevraud (1985) or
Israël, Mer morte: but whilst this is certainly so – he can tell
us that ‘my memory is still engaged with all these places’ –
Georges Rousse’s art per se does not constitute a flagrant arc-
haeological or cultural exploration of place: the vestigial ‘of-
feredness’ of the latter always is visible or easily sensed or, as
in Miyota, inner space opens upon a vast but just glimpsed
outer environment, but Rousse’s plastic gesture takes us far
beyond raw givenness that, yet, place-name and date honour,
4
Whilst, therefore, death, funerialness, are ever in our minds, so, equally, are notions
ever in excess of that obsession with death and morbidity that has characterised much
art, both ancient and modern.
and moves us towards, at most, a fundamentally, magically

renewed sense of any genius loci: the sight of raw site be-
comes the vision of ‘cooked’ art, if I may invoke the spirit of
Lévi-Strauss;
7: ‘space as support’, George Rousse argues, a support for that

doing-in-the-instant that so appeals to him, whether it be arc-
hitectural construction that ‘allows for movement in space’ or
the sheer ‘confrontation’ of body with space, painting’s ‘pro-
jection’ of body into space – sacred human energy ever stir-
ring the dust of place’s collapse;
8: the space of Rousse’s photographic representations, like

Mallarmé’s sense of poietic space: neither real, nor virtual, but
a space where A + B has become C, a ‘third element, fusible
and bright’:5 Entrepôt Vichy achieves this transcendence by
means of an astonishing liberation of the existing into an
otherness that is intensely diversified in its ‘dream’ without
ever leaping beyond what Mallarmé termed the ‘words of the
tribe’:6 tools of expression belonging to all and the everyday;
Martinique (1990) takes, too, such tools, this time more truly
Mallarmé’s, those of written language, and, in combination
with photographic ‘magic realism’, if I may appropriate this
designation, leaves us with neither the given nor some total
transmutation, but a hybrid as autonomous as it is straining
both ‘back’ to the given and ‘forward’ to some ultimate abso-
lute of the poetic;
9: if Rousse may regard his work as resulting in the genera-

tion of ‘spatial fiction’ – and one can readily understand such
a designation despite the tension between residual ‘primary’
realness and the ‘unrealness’ to which certain works specifi-
cally draw our attention7 – we should not imagine that such
fictionality is a place of pure spectacle: the question is a com-
plicated one, with which Rousse tussles, but which remains
inevitably open (and to which we shall return). Let it be said
5
Cf, Mallarmé’s ‘Crise de vers’, in Divagations.
6
See, for example, Malllarmé’s ‘Le Tombeau d’Edgar Poe’.
7
Though such ‘unrealness’ is, of course, the manifest réalité seconde of art.
here, provisionally, that the installation work for Paris – Rue

de Lappe (1998), vast, complex, as time-consuming as any
theatrical choreography, is undertaken not purely to produce
an enticing, entertaining exhibition of its ingeniousness or
even its enchantment: Rousse’s motivations, as I shall seek fi-
nally to argue, run deeper and ever search, as Bonnefoy might
write, beyond the sign, beyond the yet glorious shimmer of
image.
The artistic work that Georges Rousse gives us, let us empha-
sise, remains yet the photographic trace, the thin signature of a partic-
ular man’s attention and creation left on a sensitised paper surface
produced by the action of light at a particular time, in a particular
place. The logic of photography is at once simple and extraordinary,
complex and ever individualised. The photograph is the drawing, the
grapheme, of light itself, of that which light impacts, ‘lights upon’,
reveals, the grapheme too of the eye behind the camera lens, ever sel-
ecting, adjusting, determining. As such it leaps, despite any protests,
beyond the seeming banalisation to which, some argue, popular digital
usage subjects it: it is the locus of an infinity, in fact, both of observed
and observer, their junction, their separation, their becoming and their
relativity, their ephemeral absoluteness, their fleeting definitiveness.
To deem Georges Rousse a ‘voyeur’ – as well as a ‘graffitist’ –, whilst
having some real pertinence (one might think again of the Entrepôt
Vichy work or works of pure photographed inscription, and all gazing
through a tiny lens may be felt to betray a voyeuristic, even erotic in-
clination somewhat diffused though still there in all eying of the other)
–, to characterise Rousse thusly risks masking other dimensions of
(Rousse’s) photographic gesture. Certainly, as Davvetas writes, the
final image does not allow a total exegesis of Rousse’s poiein, his
doing. Rousse himself tells us that the camera, initially, was ‘second-
ary’: painting and drawing maintained primary significance; and, even
later, photography he holds to be a ‘tool’, i.e. not an end. And, if only
a tool, photography could lead to what end? One, presumably, in con-
sequence, beyond art’s trace? Régis Durand writes that Rousse’s work
does ‘not involve and deploy photography as a medium, but [as] the
theoretical and critical principle that it manifests, [...] bringing to the
fore such notions as indexicality, trace, reproducibility and archive’
and he goes on to suggest that there are ‘three zones whose coexis-
tence determines the perceptual and critical field of his photograph:

circle, frame, and field’. But whilst such observations can be readily
and increasingly appreciated in Rousse’s work, especially after the
early photographic records of figurative painting in place – circle: the
Le Mans work, or that of Lyon or Miyota, all 1999, for example;
frame: Metz (1994) or Vienne (1995); field (a fuzzier notion): Clichy
(1999) or Argentan, Maison de Fernard Léger –, in effect, such
‘zones’ overlap and intertwine their logic: surely all of Rousse’s pho-
tography remains a material medium, a concretely explored way and
avenue, offering access to, and an archiving of, modes of being and
relating, dreaming and ‘seeing’, that exceed the pertinence of the no-
tions Durand yet observantly brings to our attention. If Rousse seeks
to push photography to its limits, it is because from the outset his deep
and ever emerging half-sensed mission, whilst choosing the photo-
graph as his ideal avenue of doing, sees and feels and senses, beyond
the product of photography, something deeper and greater, thus giving
us an oeuvre only photographic in appearance. One could, of course,
argue similarly, and despite the vast surface distinctions to be made, in
the case of a Faucon or a Cordehard, a Denis Roche or the Canadian
Ernest Cadegan. At the heart of the logic of the photographic act, then,
Rousse lives, is fully conscious of – and this, despite, perhaps in part
because of, the intense fullness of physical experience and action on
the site of photography’s doing –, a voidedness, an emptiness in the
very bosom of seeming accomplishment, a desire returning, a desire
for being and having, where the grapheme of light finally supplies,
definitively, neither.
Light, in principle, offers revelation, of thereness, of what is,

of presence. And yet the grapheme of light’s action upon the world,
remains merely the latter’s image, it offers appearance, illusion of be-
ing, intangibleness, absence. On the one hand, dreamed coincidence of
self and world via image; on the other, Rousse’s sense, our sense, no
doubt, too, of what he often terms – within the very space of his pho-
tograph (Montbéliard [1995], for example) – ‘unrealness’, yet an un-
realness somehow emanated from what is universally termed the
‘real’. Rousse has spoken, merging notions of presence and metaphor,
of his ‘search for light in sordid places’: his doing in the latter is pre-
dicated, he adds, on ‘welcoming it’, ‘making it the obsessive subject’
of his doing: simultaneously, no doubt indistinguishably in a sense,
seeking out physical light is a seeking out of symbolic, transfigurative

light – ontic light, I should call it, the light of being available at the
centre of all that is – but in its deep tension of what language frag-
ments and categorises as realness and unrealness. In his correspon-
dence with Jocelyne Lupien, Rousse speaks of ‘finding a way out
through art. With only the light of art, but also that [light] seemingly
produced by inner energy’. Photographic images such as those of va-
ryingly luminous white volumes hanging in black or half-lit space – in
the Tokyo work (1998) or Kanazawa (1998), say, or, again, the vari-
ous Embrasure or Gallarate (1987) works – all allow us to appreciate
Rousse’s fusion of light as a physical, sensory phenomenon and expe-
rience – experience both prior to, and within, via, the created product:
the photo-graph – and light understood to be a metaphor for the reve-
latory power of psychical energy, consciousness in all of its unspeak-
able vastness and depth in relation to self’s doing and its ‘objects’.
All of this means that Rousse, in material, ‘real’ terms, will seek out
places of light’s possible passage, windows, doors, skylights, will cut
and pierce to further access, vary, amplify or nuance physical light,
will use artificial lighting or phosphorescent paint to similar ends.
And, simultaneously, coextensively, both the energy of the produced
‘unrealness’, the virtuality that is the now inseparableness of image-
as-absence and image-as-presence, and the energy, psychical, mental,
spiritual, we may term it, at the heart of the self’s contemplation and
doing – such energies bear the only name Rousse feels able to
attribute to them: light. Light: photos, perfect figure for the full-
ness/emptiness, the presence/absence of ontos, of being – and its lo-
gos.
Let us, at this point, gather into some further coherence our
appreciation of Georges Rousse’s modes and processes, both in strict-
ly physical terms and conceptually. Material protocols mutate from
painting chosen available architecture, walls, floors, ceilings, etc., as
with Entrepôt Vichy, but continuously right through to very recent
works such as Saint-Jacques-de-Compostelle (2000) or Étioles (2000),
into that direct intervention in and on such architectural space which
will entail cutting, dismantling, breaching, all forms of deconstruction
of the existent in order to construct the envisioned, the conceptualised.
Catherine Strasser argues that Rousse is not a ‘progressive rebuilder’,
and certainly what reconstructive ‘advance’ Rousse’s gesture entails
aims at no permanency: it produces the fleeting trace of some quasi-

ideality or dream offered to a space destined to disappear, Roussian
reconstruction and all. Rousse’s preparatory work involves sketches,
variants, Polaroid shots. Endless adjustment and readjustment is re-
quired, using transparencies to ‘guide’ the camera, going back and
forth between camera and space-to-be-modified-and-photographed, all
in order perfectly to ‘project’ imagined form onto ‘framed’ space. The
grids and rings that proliferate in Rousse’s work, whether they involve
chalking, painting, construction or reconstruction, all pass through
such immaculate processes of adjustment, alignment and verification.
Witness, by way of example, the exquisite geometry and optical ma-
thematics at play in works such as Le Mans (1999) or Varsovie (2003)
or Vitry (2007), where characteristically, moreover, the gaze is invited
to view different transfigurative options thinkable for/in the same
space. Colour, of course, is at the intimate heart of Rousse’s vision, as
is his lettering, his ‘poetry’ of letters and individual words or his car-
tographic forms. None are processual modes, however, they remains
variations of painting, drawing, volumising, elements not of photogra-
phy per se, but of what photography can capture within the infinity of
its cast net. This ‘net’, however, is synonymous with what Michel Di-
euzaide regards as the magic of Rousse’s focal point – which rests on
the material assembly I have described and which Rousse’s work al-
ways allows us to sense, if not absolutely to rationally dissect, as
viewer of his photographs.
To move towards a more abstract understanding of what such

basic physical modes of artistic production represent is at once, as
with all such endeavours, risky, uncertain, infinitely arguable; and yet
delightfully so, because fascinating, humanly intriguing, natural: ulti-
mately, all language is conceptual, structural, as abstracted from and
connected to the ‘real’ as Rousse’s oeuvre itself. And so, I offer the
following compact observations towards an intitial conceptualisation
of the modes and protocols we see at play here:
1: Rousse’s work is multiply interventional, it acts upon the

given world, and it ‘comes between’ world and self, joining
and yet stressing difference, deferring and blurring the forms
of such difference;
2: Rousse’s gesture is transformative, predicated on metamor-

phosis, at the same time as it is retentive of givenness;
3: such replasticisation as is constantly involved mirrors the

ever moving plasticity both of the world and our thinking, our
consciousness, of the work;
4: such ongoing (re)thinking of what is, emphasises the degree

to which creation is never static, both within the oeuvre as a
whole and within a given photograph – where thought en-
dlessly pursues the physical and symbolic thread of the
work’s infinity;
5: if a logic of trompe-l’oeil and illusion are elements at issue

in Rousse’s work, they are not gratuitous: the ‘play’, the ‘in-
ter-play’ they generate does not seek some flashy theatricis-
ation, some deceptive spectacle or pure divertissement: rather
does it lay before us the question of the real, its inherent plas-
ticity I have just evoked and which implies a givenness that is
mobile, available to surprise (its surprise for us, and our sur-
prising of it), poetic – that is, poietic, plunged into the heart of
an endless, ever renewable poiein, doing or creatableness;
6: Rousse’s work thus finds in itself, thinks itself into, an on-

going condition of virtualisation: it is a living, working phi-
losophy of the architectural, the spatial, the place/non-place of
their potentiality, their potentiation;
7: hence, from a founding logic of the morbid, the moribund,

there emerges, ceasely refigured, replasticised, a logic, a poie-
tics, if I may put it that way, of birth, rebirth: Demosthenes
Davvetas has finely detailed this conceptual maieutic process
which involves Rousse’s ongoing delivery – with, let it be
added, its concomitant notion of liberation, deliverance: a
birthing of new realness, a secondary realness, that of art’s
new consciousness of feasible realness, out of the matrix, the
womb, of the given;
8: this conceptual movement – for it is essentially a movement

of mind – may be said to operate a double sublimation: not
merely an elevation, a ‘raising high into the air’, of art over

the givenness of the real, i.e. a transcendence that would imp-
ly art’s aesthetic superiority: certainly, such a conceptualisa-
tion of art’s gesture is ever available to viewer and artist; but,
further, in Rousse’s work – as in Baudelaire’s – , the ‘sordid’,
the ‘derelict’, the ‘grotesque’ (with all of their metaphoric ap-
plications), because they remain either visible or clearly im-
plicit within the final photographic residue, may be unders-
tood, conceptualised, felt even, as fundamental to sublimity:
what we normally conceive of as a division between upper
and lower, transcendent and immanent, dissolves: all becomes
sublimis, magnificent, ‘divine’.
Reflexions such as these, inevitably are equally relatable to

broader questions of perception and image, truth and fiction which can
at times preoccupy Rousse or certain of those critics meditating his
work. Let us take a closer look at a number of works before proceed-
ing to some further global observations pertaining to these questions –
which, whilst pertinent to all assessment of art, come into especial fo-
cus in the context of Rousse’s strongly self-aware, even arguably self-
reflexive, gesture. The Bercy (1985) photograph we can see on
Rousse’s own website – from which I shall, on this occasion, draw all
examples – offers a ‘virtual architecture’ in the form of a large, ‘solid’
but luminously transparent cross imposed on empty warehouse space.
We perceive this as a physical impossibility virtually materialised; it
illuminates the very spaces of the warehouse it covers/uncovers. We
understand it to be a superbly engineered illusion, yet we perceive it
as a photographic reality, perhaps not grasping Rousse’s ingenious
technique. The Rome (1986) piece, classified – Rousse’s groupings
overlap and are not technically determined in any firm way – as a cre-
ation ‘through the mirror’, is perceptually challenging and enchanting
in that, via the fusion of a blue geometric square imposed onto interior
space and the image of trees somehow mirrored and projected with
their sky onto this same interior space, the eye and the mind struggle
to stabilise rationally the spatiality and the underpinning reality at the
heart of the perceived. The image Rousse gives us in his Les Mesnuls
(2005) photograph (similarly grouped) is equally superb in its magical
inventiveness, but it does not leave us as dizzy as the Rome (1988)
image just discussed: we are relatively sure as to where we are: a bath-
room focussing attention on the console with its washbasin, the facing
window giving out onto a long view across some garden to distant
trees, the side window a little less reassuring as to spatial organisation,
the whole slightly warped by wide lens effect. What delights and sur-
prises, however, is the mirror attached to the window still facing the
washbasin, and, more specifically, the space it reflects: a brilliantly
painted and multihued interior space suspended in all its incongruity
by virtue of its framed mirroredness in the midst of the plain and natu-
rally given bathroom space. It is a wonderful image, Dali-like, surreal,
yet equally comprehensible in its magic and without the flurry of
psychical implications which surreal meldings of A + B generate. The
Berlin (2003) photograph shows a stylish desk with chair and lamp, in
clean surroundings, with a ‘painting’ – Rousse’s classification is tab-
leaux: pictures, painted images, tableaus or artistic arrangements – on
the back wall, but a large one, reaching to the floor. If, again, we are
not plunged into the swirl of the unconscious or phantasm, we do real-
ize that this picture-on-the-wall (with its own swirling scrawl of yel-
low, red and blue lines on similarly hued pallid ‘backcloth’) carries
within it/behind it a hidden, secret reality – or is it illusion?: steps,
walls, corridor, some entrance or other space. And, we wonder, just
how staged is the entire ‘scene’ the image depicts, how true, how fic-
tional – this on the part of an artist wary of theatricisation, he has told
us, of spectacle. Three other examples will suffice in this preliminary
exploration, and let us firstly take the Vitry (2007), featured by
Georges Rousse in the category of ‘place’, and then the Clichy (1999)
photograph as well as the Grands Moulins (2005) piece, both grouped
under the heading of ‘elements’. The Vitry photographs – Rousse
gives us three on his website – show what appear to be var-ious pseu-
do-wrappings of a building adjacent to a main road, different modes,
in effect, of a same reality, so that we are brought, as ever, to question
the capacity of the eye to actually see the ‘truth’ of the real, caught as
we are in the game of a toying perceptual manipulation – with no in-
tent to deceive, however, or even mystify, puzzled as we may remain:
we are left to deal with photographs and so we are not able to fully
benefit from a sensing of our direct relation to place. The Clichy pho-
tograph goes further. Its ‘reality’ seems stunningly unenvisageable.
How could, we ask, a whole other, essentially outside, world suddenly
surge forth in the middle of this vast interior space? Is the image offer-
ing us a ‘penetration’ into the innards of the ambient space? Is the im-
age somehow superimposed upon the latter? The ‘impossible’ seems

to be made available.8 Rousse plays with time and space, reveals their
imaginable realness, that utopian non-place Davettas speaks of. The
image is a box of delights, of pseudo-Pongian ‘obplay’ and ‘objoy’ –
for, make no mistake about it, pleasure is at stake in such a fabulous,
affabulating trompe-l’oeil. The Grands Moulins photograph (still on
Georges Rousse’s website at latest viewing) gives us a hoop of fire
‘miraculously’ hanging free in disused, raw industrial premises, light
filtering through windows onto concrete columns and rubble. We are
transported, ‘metaphorised’ (‘carried over’) into image, into a ‘sym-
bolicalness’, a ‘thrown-togetherness’ of the preexisting and the
dreamed, a place of epiphanic magicalness that other Grands Moulins
works do not necessarily seek to achieve – for example, that photo
which allows us to peer through a possibly prefabricated blue-painted
wall, pierced and showing the vast abandoned space that the burning
hoop no longer ‘illuminates’ à la Rimbaud.
Endless questions may be said to arise from these works.

They echo, moreover, through the entirety of Georges Rousse’s oeu-
vre, and, perhaps most importantly, they are not, unless we should opt
for reductive thinking, amenable to flat resolution: the questions we
may ask allow us to understand the fluidity, the openness, the sheer
delicacy of the conceptualisableness of matters of perception and im-
age, truth and fictionality, in art in general, and perhaps particularly
that of what some deem to be a contemporary quadraturist.9 Take the
question of perception. There is that of Rousse himself, his incipient
gaze, absorbing and meditative, yet, knowing of his own root intention
to intervene, quickly calculating, selecting particular space and angles,
contemplating, conceiving architectural modification, perceiving both
the realness, givenness, and, beyond the latter, attending to appearance
8
In effect, Rousse builds the structure in situ, then imposes, one must here assume,
onto this complex but minimal structure, the photographic images of the spaces he
wishes to represent via a final photographic capture of the assemblage in the chosen
Clichy context. But, of course, all we see, on the website and at the exhibition, is the
amazing final composite photographic image meticulously elaborated.
9
Quadratura is an art flourishing in the Baroque period and entails the use of perspec-
tival illusion, trompe-l’oeil, and thus embraces architectural and sculptural logic via
painting. One might view, by way of example, the work of Andrea Pozzo at the
Sant’Ignazio in Rome.
and a disappearance, an erasure concomitant with new appearance.

Such portrayal as Rousse chooses to offer is thus merged with what
may be thought of as a self-portrayal, a portraiture attentive to inner
vision, yet stemming from a perceiving of the given as a site of great
plasticity, an infinite feasibility, in correspondence yet with the inner
eye – the imagination, the image-machine of selfness. From such per-
ceptual equations we may move to those affecting the viewers we are
of Rousse’s photographs. And, of course, we are immediately im-
mersed in a plurality of seeing, moving not only from your perception
of, say, what is at play in the Vitry (2007) photographs or the Les
Mesnuls (2003) mirror-in-bathroom photograph, to mine, but also
within your or my own perception of a given piece, what is seen and
thought, perceived-conceived, may be understood, indeed, lived, as
endlessly shifting, becoming, as ever renewable, rebirthable as
Rousse’s own gesture. In this sense we might argue that, despite its
apparent immobility, the photographic image is infinitely mobile, and,
whilst this may be maintained of Boubat’s memorable Petite fille aux
feuilles mortes, jardin du Luxembourg (946) or Atget’s images of
shop windows or a woman smoking on a cobbled street or some of
those early, ‘primitive’ photographs such as Edouard-Denis Baldus’
1854 Moulin en Auvergne or Henri le Secq’s 1856 Vase de fleurs, fan-
taisie photographique, Rousse’s constructions invite us to penetrate
still further and deeper into the luminous forests of their graphemes.
We may be tempted to simplify the debate by maintaining that the im-
age viewed is, in its seeming distancing of itself from givenness, from
Bonnefoy’s présence, and its generation of art itself, merely artful-
ness, artificiality, artifice, etc.; by maintaining therefore that such an
image is the act and place of sheer play, a pure fiction d’espace or spa-
tial fictionality, as Rousse himself can call it, and, as such, is mere
surface, superficial ‘unspace’ as Gérard Titus-Carmel has termed art’s
and writing’s ‘non-place’ of being and doing. But we cannot so easily
slip out of the question: once posed, it remains a site of arguable-
ness.10 And, of course, we would be dismissing deep issues such as the
sheer strangeness, the magic realness of images and perception, not
just the conceivable beauty of form, but the more profound relation-
10
In effect, ‘unspace’ yet remains – but, then, it is the place of one’s poiein, one’s
making, remaking, of the world, and it involves the entirety of one’s bodily and men-
tal being – the act and place of what Titus-Carmel terms his ‘presence to the world’.
ship between forme and fond, all surface appearance and all conceiva-
ble meaning at its heart – all matters, by way of example, pertinent in
effect to Rousse’s doing, but, too, to ours. So we may then return to
the Bercy (1985) photograph discussed above or the vertig-inous one
of Rome (1988), and we may ask whether there is any truth in the im-
ages they provide. Can they be reasonably held to be ‘lies’ in that, as
Davvetas has written, they ‘negate’ – arguably, only, of course – the
topos (warehouse, given place) to create an ou-topos, a utopian (image
of) place? If so, is all dreaming, imagining, theorising, ‘lie’? Rousse’s
work – it is possible that it is one of its principle beauties – plunges us
incessantly into a weighing of such fundamental seeming paradoxes:
seeming, of course, because only language imposes such divides as
truth and falsehood, reality and fiction. What a work such as Clichy
(1999), or again, the Grands Moulins (2005) piece mentioned above
thrusts before us, is the truth of fiction, the representationalness of the
invented, the ‘presence’ of the image, the sheer, infinite depth of all
createdness, whether given or humanly, artificially continued. And, if
we find this hard to swallow, then we can at least acknowledge that
Georges Rousse’s démarche raises the question of all of the above.
And that this is no small thing. And that he does so, silently, leaving
us to our own perceiving and conceiving, which is one of the signs of
great art: its immersion in its own teeming creation and not some in-
sistent ideology. Jocelyne Lupien suggests that every image – of light,
let us remember – Rousse gives us – let us say, the 1984 Sydney‘s
floating human figure in its crystal cocoon of blue light, or the 2003
virtual ‘geometric forms’ of Elstal, suspended in mid-air in a great
bare room – ‘has the power to “envelop” and “contain” us and to pro-
vide us context (a place) for our [own] psychic investments’. And, not
dissimilarly, Alain Sayag asserts that this is an art that ‘[brings] us fi-
nally just to ourselves, our solitude, our anxiety’ – but, I should add,
our wonderment as we too stand, with Rousse, at the crossroads of all
thinking about objectivity and subjectivity, givenness and creation,
other and self.
I should like to hone in a little more precisely, having reached

the point at which we find ourselves, on questions of purpose, motiva-
tion and desire in Rousse’s art, and I shall thus proceed to offer four-
teen forcibly compact remarks in this connection, largely contextua-
lised in reference to a freely chosen work:
1: Monique Sary has spoken of Rousse’s work as one ‘des-

tined to calm present times’ and, in that, its power might be
said to coincide with that of Poussin’s Saisons of which Bon-
nefoy has recently spoken in The Radiant Space11or that at the
heart of, say, Cézanne’s Horloge noire or Braque’s Bougeoir,
for certainly Rousse’s gesture, meditative, aspires to that ser-
enity capable of oozing from even the most disturbing givens
of the real. Works such as those of the 1987 Latina (with its
rich red-painted walls and naturally flooding light), or the
long narrow ascending stairwells, pure white or pitch-black,
of the 2006 Madrid photographs, leave us in no doubt as to
the role of quietude in Rousse’s aesthetics-cum-ontology.
2: such placidness does not disallow an awakening of the un-

conscious via the broad démarche Rousse’s art employs, this
in some measure due to the artist’s largely solitary entry into
empty and not uncommonly sordid space: a confrontation
with the self’s more ‘remote’ and even repressed psychic
zones, and possibly, a half-conscious desire to explore such a
confrontation in a universe of stunning contrastive materiality
and mentation. To witness works such as the 1983 Bordeaux,
CAPC, with its crouching figure with ‘aura’ and adjacent star
in their raw environs, or any of the numerous circle-ring-
tunnel photographs such as the 1997 Barcelone series, is to
join the movement of mind down its endless strange corridors.
3: Georges Rousse has spoken of his desire to share his enthu-

siasm and his hope: his is not an art of narcissistic satisfac-
tion: it is predicated on a vision beyond the degraded, an ar-
dour and eagerness in the midst of a world that might oppress,
a zest seeking to act contagiously and uplift. This seems clear
from the outset as we contemplate the invigorating energy of
form and colour in the Entrepôt Vichy work, that of the same
period – Villeurbanne (1982) or Serquigny (1982) –, or, say,
the serene fervour of his word-works, if I may call them that:
the lovely unassuming but uplifting transformations of the
11
The title, proposed to me by Bonnefoy, of the translation of his Le Grand Espace
(Galilée, 2007). See the Selected Bibliography.
1991 and 1992 Paris creations or, again, the Pontault-

Combault (1992) works where the potency and purpose of
EROS and GAIA reign.
4: hope and fervency are, in effect, quite avowedly generated

and, via their sharedness, somehow potentiated with a view to
exorcise the demons, real or possible, of death, decay and
darkness. Thus does ‘the light of art’ – viewed materially: the
photo-graph, and symbolically, as we have seen – ‘fight’ the
other dimensions we may feel threaten to swamp existence.
Endless are the works where this is manifest in Rousse, but I
draw attention to a fine photograph which is part of the Kobe
(1995), where we see a basic empty shed or garage-like space,
its floor shattered, the bowels of the earth beginning to gape
open, but the entire drear and barren space transformed by
Rousse’s blue, near Yves Klein blue, painting, the whole il-
luminated not in some conspicuous fashion, but through a thin
vertical sliver of space allowing the light of the world, of be-
ing itself, to cast its minimal but sure and transformative ra-
diance across the inner space.
5: a further powerful motivation behind Rousse’s work cen-

tres on his desire and delight to act or do, make, in the instant:
spontaneously, impulsively, in a gesture of multiple freeing:
of self and other of any lingering demons, of place from its
subsidence of energy and potentiality, of art’s poiein from its
conceivably constraining aesthetic agendas, and so on. The
Kobe work just described clearly emerges via such a logic of
instantaneous determination, and even though weighing and
meditation, as well as ultimate care and scrupulous execution,
are involved in the creation of works such as the 2000 Paris,
Belleville, still it remains that Rousse privileges the signific-
ance of the experience of extemporaneous, unprepared con-
ceptualisation and doing in situ.12
12
See the article by Dominique Roussel.
6: such method or anti-method does not, very far from it, pre-
vent that drive to think, question and imagine Rousse clearly
believes is equally central to all he accomplishes: in effect,
doing-in-the-instant is synonymous with thinking. The actions
are one, quite unparadoxically for him. To create the images
the Le Mans (1999) work or the Argentan, Maison de Fer-
nand Léger work give us, demands, for Georges Rousse, a
seamless integration of imaginative immediacy and material
intervention, whether the latter involves cutting, painting,
construction, materialisation or dematerialisation as he can
call it. Rousse is not an architect of prefabrication, but a doer,
a poet, of the magical moment of an ever-feasibleness.
7: as such, one of the many purposes of Rousse’s work is to

freely explore the media at his disposal, to discover what the
sheer materiality of space is composed of – and may be, via
his own spontaneously unfolding desire in situ, composable
of. The Argentan work thus thrusts the artist into the infinite
material potentiality of place’s beingness, if I may express it
that way. His art thus explores not just art’s modalities, but al-
so those, endlessly imaginable, thinkable, of space’s/place’s
intrinsic being. The Kobe (1995) white on black piece or a
good number of the remarkable Oberhausen (1996) photo-
graphs reveal an artist of very great insight and a vision ex-
tending far and deep into the invisibility of space’s offered-
ness.
8: such purposing works to reveal, to show, to bring before

the eye and to the mind the infinite equations of a making, a
doing, a poiein that demonstrate the ever possible resolution
of what may seem like aporias, simultaneously physical and
mental, psychological: thus does neglect become caring, sul-
liedness elegance, darkness light, solitude accompaniment,
fear joy, and so on. Such instinctively desired restoration of
the exalting is not so much a paradox, nor, despite seeming il-
lusion, is it mere shimmer: rather is it shown to be made, ever
makeable, thinkable, realisable. 1984 works such as La Jolla
or the Sydney we have evoked above or Orleans seek to show
that, if there is paradox in Rousse’s work, it is rooted in its de-
termined and improbable accomplishment
9: in this context we should emphasise the pertinence of

Georges Rousse’s involving of young people in certain of his
creative projects. Art may have its ‘higher’ ontology, its logic
of interplay, relationship and transmutation of the earth’s gi-
venness, but at the socio-politico-economic level, and at the
latter’s heart which is psychological, emotional, spiritual, art
can once more show that imagining, making, remaking are
synonymous with self-transformation. His work with Le Cen-
tre d’Enseignement Professionnel et d’Accueil des Jeunes
(CEPAJ) in and around Lyon roots itself in a firm belief that
‘art can be a true opening’ for those somehow otherwise mar-
ginalised. Philippe Piguet has spoken eloquently and rightly
of the meaning of Rousse’s felt motivation in this regard.
Surely, beneath its crust of magical harmony, it is, too, an art
engagé.
10: from Shakespeare to Heidegger, from Reverdy to Neruda,

much has been said of poetry’s gesture of inhabitation of the
world. Rousse’s work, given its investment of place, self’s
reappropriation of earth’s abandonedness, clearly establishes
affinity with such a tradition of thought, and the artist himself
has termed demeures – dwellings, ‘receptacles for other signs’
as Régis Durand has characterised them – his radically trans-
formed de- and re-constructed, remodelled sites (resulting in
his graphemes of light) – with all their aesthetic, ecological
and spiritual connotations. The photographs showing the in-
stallation work for the Paris - Rue de Lappe (1998) work re-
veal the full complexity of ‘dwelling’ within the uninhabita-
ble. Ultimately, I should maintain, the demeures remain less
physical than mental, notional: dwelling places for thought
and the ‘light of art’, but they are founded – I shall return to
this most significant factor of all – upon a deep Roussian
sense of the sacredness of an engagement with being – in the
visible world, and the invisible.
11: of course, beauty cannot be removed from the knot of mo-

tivations Rousse might proffer in response to Bonnefoy’s
(self-)querying as to the purpose of writing or painting, of all
art. But it should be understood in the fullness of its metapho-
ricity: the beauty, that is, not simply of formal arrangements
and harmonies, but that beauty at the centre of the sheer life-
affirming energy of doing, that involved in sharing med-
itation, revelation, that which offers spaces for inhabitation
where non seemed available, etc. Rousse has spoken of the
question of ‘photogenics’ with Jocelyne Lupien, and, just as
selection of space and development thereof hinges on impulse,
spontaneous knowing and following of a line of, let us call it
aesthetic, purpose, so too does this aesthetics meld instantan-
eously with an ethics, an ontology of beauty: the photograph
and its underpinning work rely on this large fusion of the me-
taphors of beauteousness, from sociopolitical engagement to a
spirituality beyond religion’s constraints. A work such as
Drewen (2003) certainly creates an extraordinary aesthetic ef-
fect with its beamed roof and framing, the light entering from
tiny apertures aloft, from a doorway and central ‘window’, the
‘lacework’ of the black crossbeams of the latter, and so on;
but all such beauty, given, framed, constructed, chosen, finds
itself powerfully supported by purposes far beyond, though
manifested through, material aesthetics.
12: it has been suggested that transgression underpins

Rousse’s gesture. If this is so – it is not a term he uses him-
self – it should be understood via its basic etymology: a step-
ping or going beyond. There is no desire for violent contra-
vention of art’s long history in Georges Rousse’s gesture, but,
as with all art, a making-beyond-but-with-givenness, a free-
ing, and a felt aspiration to explore a freeing of what is into its
further infinity. No disobedience, but rather a spontaneous,
visceral and mental obedience and consenting to the deep pos-
sibilities of doing and thinking our being-in-the-world.
13: Rousse is quite clear: all his work ultimately constitutes a

search for ‘something beyond artistic practice as such’: it is a
significant and plainly stated ambition. Art is not an end, but a
channel, a conduit, a way. And each photograph casts its light
upon this uncertain errancy and question. Safed (1990) gives
us a dazzlingly lit room, with its end wall, with a vertical rec-
tangle of blue-white luminescence or ‘window’ containing a
human figure in this wall, and, to the right, a tiny red circle
floating in space. It is a work in which one can feel the strain-
ing of Rousse’s quest beyond the work’s specific constituent

elements, metaphors all for the unnameableness at the end of
its way. Or we may look at the 2000 Tshu Rolpa-Clermont
Ferrand where Rousse’s photograph, showing a ‘virtual’ map
floating free in a bare, windowless, factory-like space, invites
us along paths of contemplation and inner journeying dis-
tinctly in excess of the signs of art.
14: Two conjoined purposes allow us at once to complete this

assessment of motivation in Rousse’s démarche, and to lead
us into the final observations I should like to offer. On the one
hand, Rousse tells us of his profound sensitivity and aspiration
to what he terms a ‘sacredness of space’. On the other hand,
he can declare, in correspondence with the latter, that ‘my ob-
jective [is] not just to take a photograph, but to narrate a sa-
cred action’. From the basis of an instinctive ambition to sa-
cralise givenness, the astonishing fact of spatiality, an infinity
at the heart of its seeming finitude, its offeredness as a site of
doing, making, poiein – from such a base of desiring con-
sciousness, Rousse proceeds to seek, enact and photographic-
ally ‘narrate’ a further sacralisation of his own doing in the
endless sites of the earth’s, of being’s, spatiality. All of this is
articulated beyond existing philosophical or intellectual equa-
tions, via a raw but sensitive and meditated sense of the art-
ist’s being and doing in the given visible world, though such
visibility, somehow, ever flits in and out of an invisibility
synonymous with its mystery, buoying it all up, rendering im-
age-ination ceaselessly possible within the world.
With all ‘idea of religion [banished]’ from his work, Georges

Rousse affirms, he is yet equally insistent upon what he terms a ‘spiri-
tuality’ which he is eager to both confirm and further ‘confer’ in his
relation to place, and especially more needy abandoned and disinhe-
rited place. His approach to the latter and his action in it, his art, he
deems ‘ascetic’: there may be jubilation and the expenditure of joyous
energy, but Rousse’s art, its conception, its fabrication and its end
product, is not baroque, showy, gaudily ornamental, seeking spectacu-
larness. Though the photograph seems to offer but surface, Rousse’s
gesture contemplates ontic depth, the sheer poiesis of things, forms,
thought, the mystery of their being and their making. It is an art finally
less cultural and less intellectual than it is spiritual and poetic. It does
not privilege memory or nostalgia, despite any ‘archaeology’ we may
see attached to it, any ‘confronting [of] palimpsest meaning of sites’,
as Philippe Piguet has written. Alain Sayag has gone as far as to sug-
gest, rather extravagantly to my mind (for ‘being’ remains a central
concern), that Rousse produces work ‘outside of history, being and all
memory’. None of this should be understood as implying the superior-
ity of art over presence, some absoluteness of antinature: we have
seen Rousse assert that his search exceeds the presumed limits of ‘ar-
tistic practice as such’. The ‘dematerialisations’ his work involves
may be seen as gestures deep into the non-materialness of finitude, the
epiphanic potential of the ephemeral, the strange light of the opaque.
Such a spiritual exploration-cum-self-exploration, ‘proceeding inde-
pendently of religion’, Rousse again stresses, thus perceives a sacred-
ness in the midst of, in the very bosom of, the ‘profane’, but the ‘spiri-
tuality’ of which he speaks is less an idea than an experience, a feeling
emanating from being-and-doing-in-place. The ontology that it im-
plies thus lacks anything we may regard as ideological or purely theo-
retical. Perhaps, at best, an instinctive subjective knowing that the
drawing-painting (graphein) of light (phos/photos) can somehow por-
tray, whether in the work of the various Embrasures or Latina (1987)
or Arles, all with their beautiful harmonies of red and white light, or
the suffused luminescence of Safed (1990) or the needle of white light
of Marseille (1986), or yet again, and most poignantly, the explosive
green transcendence of Hiroshima (2001).
THE INTIMACY OF SILENCE:
GENEVIÈVE ASSE
The art of Geneviève Asse plunges its roots deep into her Bre-
ton childhood in and around Vannes, the ever shifting and shimmering
sea of Brittany’s southern coast, the vast horizons hovering in the vo-
latile sunlight and mist that bathe them, the crisp air and floating skies
that speak of a sure but barely describable presence. The images of
such early years, she tells Silvia Baron Supervielle, have not departed
over the course of a long life spent largely in Paris, and, indeed, have
been renewed and refreshed in their yet seemingly eternal power and
delicacy via summer sojourns on the Île aux Moines, occasions filling
the artist’s numerous as yet unpublished notebooks with the teeming
traces of loved place. To look upon the paintings and engravings of
Geneviève Asse, however, is to enter a world less of flagrant signs and
certain location. This will increasingly be true as we move from the
immediate givenness of, say, the very early Bouteilles (1942) appro-
priating and spatially and chromatically orchestrating simple everyday
objects, caressed yet beyond perspectival concern, to a work such as
the 1967 Fenêtre intérieure whose subtle and fused modulat-ion of
blues, whites, purples leaves us suspended between the window open-
ing upon outer air and atmosphere and the window that allows the
gaze equally to bend back upon itself and the haze of an inner world
of self-contemplation.1 The span of Asse’s plastic production is great,
but it is coherent, fluidly imbricated from her first independent exhibi-
tion in 1954 at the Galerie Michel Warren in Paris to oils on canvas
such as the large (200 x 200 cm) Ouverture de la nuit (1973) or the
2005 Écriture, the former with its light dusky blue resonance sliced
open with a small horizontal cut of white (: a dawning?, a space of
peering, revelation, pure, implicit illumination?), the second a tall ste-
la (195 x 97 cm) of slate blue incised with barely perceptible white
lines (miming written inscription but, in effect, inscribing the act and
silently articulated reality of painting’s own poiein). Geneviève Asse
1
See Selected Bibliography. No personal website, but a good deal can be seen online:
the Asse - Dossier pédagogique prepared by the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Rennes is
particularly valuable.
was a volunteer ambulance driver during World War II and helped to

evacuate the survivors of the Terezin concentration camp: it was an
experience profoundly impacting her consciousness, one that will shift
her work from figurative specificities in the direction of an art of dis-
cretion, what many will deem abstraction, but an art, equally, of deep,
private meditation and a rigorous exploration of the subtle mystery of
being’s spatiality and chromatics. Charles Juliet will speak of an art of
‘high exigency’ and Rainer Michael Mason will argue that ‘few con-
cessions [are made] to the habits of our gaze’ (RMM, 210). And yet
nothing, as we shall see, can be said to be hermetic or esoteric in Ge-
neviève Asse’s gesture: Ouverture de la nuit and Écriture, for exam-
ple, may, as will all great and intense work, make demands upon self
and the other, but there is no provocation, no radical desire for rup-
ture, simply a slow contemplative evolution of the self’s relation to the
world whose intrinsic logic is steeped in a ‘silence’ Asse’s art will se-
renely reflect. Not only does such an art, as Marie-Cécile Miessner
suggests, ‘belong to our time’, but it dovetails, at once seamlessly and
in original fashion, with much great art preceding it, thus providing, at
the heart of its calm, ever becoming continuity, what Nathalie Gallis-
sot rightly perceives as an intense experience of painting. In the pages
that follow, I shall begin by addressing issues of abstraction and mi-
nimality, discuss important affinities with the work of other artists,
detail Geneviève Asse’s plastic modes, manners and materials, turning
then to questions of motivation, the meaning and pertinence of a very
largely untheorised art, and ending with some tentative words of con-
clusion focussed upon three works not previously examined spanning
a long and surprisingly diverse if subtly confederated major plastic
achievement.
Abstract is a term many critics have used to speak of work

such as the above-mentioned Écriture, her 2003 Stèles assemblage, a
polyptych gathering three 55 x 29 cm Asse blue ‘columns’ above two
centred below, but also her 1955 Composition with its subtle melding
of never pure whites, blues, yellow creams, and even more surprising-
ly, one might feel, her 1953 Route de Mantes, bare, unafraid before a
reality seemingly dissolving though firmly evoked. Certainly, such
work reveals a slow but sure detachment from any necessity to cling
to some flat realist detailing. Certainly, there is a slow freeing of the
eye and the mind from the object’s material flagrancy. Yet nothing
The Intimacy of Silence: Geneviève Asse 71
here may be said to be abstruse, deliberately and mystifyingly recon-

dite. Abstraction, yes, if by that term we follow Geneviève Asse’s
own important affirmation that painting is ‘already an abstraction’:
layers of paint, even careful mimetic intention, will never alter the
‘secondary’, removed character of art – its inevitable antinature, as,
once again, Pierre Reverdy has it. When she tells us that those poets
‘dear to me are abstract’, Geneviève Asse is evoking their capacity to
penetrate, meditatively, musingly, the very complexion of our immer-
sion in and relation to the mystery of our being, the being of things. A
work such as La Route de Mantes, or Bouteilles, or, again, her 1961
Objet dans l’espace – with its bluish-mauve trace plunged into and
fused with ambient creamy-rose-blue and green-tinted space – such
pieces hover between finitude and a sense of expansive spatial energy,
an indefinable, frontierless presence. The real and its landscapes be-
come a vast locus of light and shadow, far beyond yet connected with
the experience of a Monet or a Seurat. Transparency, atmospheric
shimmer, mobility of air, light, colour: this is not the abstraction of a
Ben Nicholson or a Piet Mondrian or a Van Doesburg. A plastic, aes-
thetically alert, but lived and projected reflection on Asse’s rootedness
in the silence of things: yes, by all means, but never experienced as
pure, cold, abstracted geometrics, a mathematics cerebral, calculated,
rationally ideal.
Certainly, we may speak, with others, of a degree of austerity,

somewhat ascetic, even ‘monastic’, it has been written, reflecting at
once an early paucity of means, a making-do with the few objects at
hand, but, too, Geneviève Asse’s natural, instinctive, happy capacity
for squeezing wonderment from what today, for many, may seem like
very little – a few bottles, a window – but, then, too, sunlight, sky,
sea! One understands Jean-Luc Daval’s suggestion that, progressively,
in Asse’s movement towards what he terms ‘the colour of light’ – its
infinite subtleties yet largely dominated by blueness in her plastic un-
iverse – ‘the real [becomes] just an argument’; yet, I should maintain
it never ceases to be a powerful ‘argument’, one going to the energet-
ic, some would argue, the mystical, core of the being of things. Works
like Sénanque or Chemin de lumière, both from 1971, remain remark-
able paintings of light, its infinitely finespun, elusive, yet intimately
experienceable availableness. Clearly, the titles anchor us loosely in
what we may deem to be the sacredness of being-in-the-world, but
this, for Asse, implies no doctrinalness, rather the sheer splendour of

the mystery of our givenness. We may be, as are some viewers of Ge-
neviève Asse’s art, tempted to dwell upon its bareness, a certain mi-
nimality that arguably shrouds it. It is yet essential, I should argue, to
distinguish, on the one hand, minimal and frequently favoured means,
from delicate and graceful, shimmering and vibrant effects; to distin-
guish equally, on the other hand, between the varying minimalisms of,
say, Richard Serra’s 1985 Philibert et Marguerite, Dan Flavin’s 1987
Sans titre (à Maïakovski),1, or Piero Manzoni’s arte povera,2 and any
painting or engraving Geneviève Asse offers us. Asse’s gesture is nei-
ther provocative nor raw; it does not resort to monolithic monumental-
ity or modernity’s new technologies; it does not explore spectacular
reiteration or geometric absolutism. Clearly, there is nothing nominal
or perfunctory in a painting such as Chemin de lumière, nor does a
work like Objet dans l’espace aim at reductiveness, tokenness, and far
less superfluity. To enter Asse’s plastic universe is to come face to
face with the ‘ordinary’ – things, shapes, colours, light, space – dis-
creetly, unassumingly promoted to the rank of the wondrous, then to
slowly be urged to contemplate the strange imbrications of form, the
formed, and that which is beyond such confinement, offering things a
larger, indefinable home, and a mode of being that exceeds the signs
of rationalised visibility. Thereness, at-handedness, never leave this
universe, nor the consciousness that lays it before us. It is just that ‘the
road to Mantes’ can never be deemed a locus of platitudinousness, any
more than the vibrant presence at the heart of early works such as
L’Atelier (1948-9) or Boîtes bleues (1948) – or, again, those seldom
offered human presences Geneviève Asse gives us in her most rare,
but exquisite nudes: the 1953-4 Nu gris, tender, warmly, whitishly ra-
diant in its blue-grey-green ambience, defying identification and con-
textualisation; the 1962 Nu, done in oil like almost all Asse`s painting,
retreating further into pure lum-inosity, the trembling intimacy of
presence`s ungraspableness; or the Nu allongé engravings, dry point
and burin, done in 1968, a few quick lines, spontaneous, superbly
2
This, clearly, is not to suggest that these works lack depth, aesthetic, even ‘spiritual’
depth: Serra’s honouring of place and human presence, Flavin’s celebration of a great
artist in terms radically his own, Manzoni’s Merda d’artista, with its audacity, its
humour, its visceral pertinence – all such work abounds in vitality, discreet and sub-
dued as they may be thought to be.
justes, to embrace with the utmost delicacy the beauty of feminine

form.
It will be clear at this point that, whilst Geneviève Asse`s art

moves, fairly early on and firmly, away from the high and detailed
specifics of the real, it by no means can be deemed divorced from the
latter, utterly abstracted from all notion of representation. A painting
such as Sénanque or the 1968 Porte blanche with its two shimmering
creamy light panels, never quite symmetrical and framed by ever shif-
tingly coloured bands, or, again, the 1993 Paysage intérieur, an etch-
ing of pure meditative yet equally visual space (: blind, window, path,
etc?) – all such works offer fullness without description, depiction
never flatly mimetic or reproductive of the visible. Nuanced revelation
replaces ‘narration’. This is as true of the 1954 Objets or La Balise of
the same year (where the real is rendered in a gesture of discreet sub-
jectivation and intimate appropriation), as it is of, say, the Nu gris we
have spoken of and which offers no feminist discourse on the female
body, no sharply outlined affective or socio-psychological argument
such as we may find in a Louise Bourgeois or an Annette Messager.
Intimacy, privacy, confidentiality dominate, meaning felt, intuited,
never forcefully displayed. This is true even in Asse’s engravings,
where we see pop up an occasional leaf or bird, ‘small sign[s], she
tells Rainer Michael Mason, in the direction of nature’, without any
fully rendered trappings, insisting that – and what more delightful re-
fusal could one find of the label of a pur et dur (as a François Morellet
might say) abstract art? – the ‘best school, for me, is the silence of na-
ture’. At the heart of Asse`s figuration lie delicacy and grace, an at
once chromatic and hyper-discreetly affective sensualness, indeed, in
the broadest sense, a mode of spirituality drawing upon the given mys-
tery and beauty of the form and formless depth of what Yves Bonne-
foy calls the ‘presence [of] the things of the simple’. The large 1966
oil on canvas, Cercle paysage (200 X 250 cm) gives us, with its
creams and yellows, its touch of green and its circular splash of red, a
chromatic atmosphere we cannot help ourselves associating with su-
nrise, sky, mist and so on (this, despite the painting’s refusal of hori-
zontality and thus the blatancy of mimesis). But the ‘landscape’ Asse
places before us exceeds all fixed narrative signs, pulling us into both
the sheer enigma of colour, and hence matter, and the latter’s infinite
contemplatableness, its volatilisation into a mode of being we may
deem non-material, intangible, ethereal. Many paintings by Geneviève

Asse invite this experience of the real, and not just work such as the
1971 Transparence, which pushes further the modes explored in
Sénanque (also 1971), or the 1992 Traversée bleue (180 x 180 cm),
with its double horizon effect, its two white ‘foaming’, frayed bands
on pale blue, but , too, its capacity for inducing dream, meditation, a
blue ‘traversal’ of the veil of matter, an entry into the obscure yet lu-
minous real of spirit. No, even more seemingly austere works such as
the ensemble of the seven large Stèles (280 x 120 cm), painted over
the 1992-99 period and recently exhibited together at the Musée des
Beaux-Arts de Quimper, or the 2003 Cercle II (diam. 120 cm), sober
though they may seem, reveal endless subtle irregularities and cease-
lessly invite us into a world not of quick semblance, but rather of ref-
lection and those emotions at once aesthetic and quasi-sacramental.
We might feel that we are just around the corner here from Mal-
larmé’s absente de tous bouquets, and perhaps, as for others even to-
day, something of the aesthetico-ontological dream of the ‘azure’’s
radiant and transparent ideality may linger in a work where light and
space are meditated to a point of high and serene intensity. Oils such
as the 1996 Infini, with its ever so softly incandescent powdery blue
incised by a single vertical white line just faintly echoed elsewhere, or
else the 2003 stela-like Verticalité, of a deeper-hued blue tonality,
sliced down its full face (280 cm) by a thin near-black blue band with
its frothy white trim and tiny traces of rose pink – such paintings con-
cern themselves, however, not really with ideality or manifestly
sought transcendence, but rather with the issue of the nature of space,
and a corresponding desire to represent plastically, chromatically, its
deep, unrepresentable alterity. There is, here, much inner vision, but,
as Germain Viatte writes, it is ‘impregnated, as it were, with a belong-
ing’, thus cancelling all opposition between abstraction and figuration,
observation and that ‘seeing’ giving rise to Rimbaldian ‘illumination’.
In a strange way, the line between a work such as the beautiful 2001
Sans titre (ligne rouge) and those drawings Geneviève Asse made and
has kept but never exhibited of wartime hospitalised patients – such a
line blurs over to reveal an unspeakable but sure continuity.
Of the numerous artists to which Geneviève Asse has alluded

in her various interviews, only a handful may be thought to have exer-
cised something approaching an influence, and even then the latter
may be said to be indirect, unconscious, beyond imitative intention.

The natures mortes of Chardin which she can commonly evoke are
held in high esteem for a certain ‘transparency’ that inhabits them, for
their ‘construction’, for the fact that they constitute ‘painting outside
of time’. This said – and it is clear that such perceived qualities find
their echo in Asse’s aesthetics – works such as Chardin’s Les Attributs
des arts or La Lavandière or La Raie, so finely commented on by
Gérard Titus-Carmel, whilst exquisitely gathering and orchestrating
their given elements, showing extreme sensitivity to light and translu-
cency and succeeding in fusing the quotidian with a certain arguable
atemporalness, yet leave us at some considerable remove from Asse’s
L’Atelier or her 1966 Nature morte au paysage chinois, the first with
its minimalities offset by the sensual elegance of its creams, browns
and grey-blues, the second with its somewhat uncharacteristic venture
into a lightly suggestive oriental manner that is not dissimilar from her
Composition dans l’espace of the same year and whose title speaks
better her intention in the former still life. The desire for independence
remains ever strong; she has never belonged to any school or group. ‘I
am, she maintains, and have always wanted to be as free as the air.’ A
‘marginal’, she can even tell Silvia Baron Supervielle, and this despite
numerous occasions which, when working for Jean Bauret or for Bi-
anchini-Ferrier of Lyon, would have allowed her to explore connec-
tions with artists as varied as Wols, Valentine Penrose, Kandinsky,
Villon, Laurens, Sonia Delaunay or Dufy – all offering designs and
commercial collaborations. As with Chardin, both Cézanne and Mo-
randi are commonly evoked in connection with Geneviève Asse, who,
herself, freely speaks of her alertness to their merits whilst denying
any direct debt to either. Morandi, a ‘brother’, she realises, only meet-
ing him in 1961, but, whilst appreciating his capacity for ‘painting
beyond painting’ – for inducing a deep meditation of being beyond
any aesthetic gesture –, she deems his work to have an atmospheric
softness stemming from the experience of Italian light, which her own
work does not possess.
Mark Rothko, Ben Nicholson, James Turrell, Barnett New-

man, Turner are some of the painters from the anglophone world Ge-
neviève Asse can speak of in admiring terms and clearly understand-
ing both delicate imbrications at work and distinct orientations that
affirm significant departures. Rothko’s art, for example, ‘expresses a
great innerness’, a quality certain to appeal to Asse ever penetrating

the screen of form to gaze at its buoying substrata, but Rothko’s
chromatics are not at all those of the more sober, discreet and classical
creator of works such as Diptyque Atlantique (1993) with its two ver-
tical ‘panels’, the one light blue, the other midday sky blue, separated-
joined by a black vertical line and framed right and left by vertical
bands, whitish yet blue-tinged. The art of James Turrell, of course,
appeals in an utterly different register: works like his 1967 Afrum 1 or
the 1981 Night Passage project light and the illusion of its volume,
and may involve cutting into existing architecture, but, whilst this is
modally at an enormous remove from Asse’s manners and methods,
the sheer power of contemplative stimulus it generates for an artist
living the mystery of the real through her painting is unmistakable.
Ben Nicholson is appreciated for his ‘rigour’, a quality never lacking
in Geneviève Asse’s gesture: his 1939 Relief peint, in the MOMA,
New York, provides a good example of abstraction’s capacity for sub-
tlety and essential form, balance and harmony at once formal and
chromatic. Barnett Newman, who can certainly offer paintings evoca-
tive of, though tonally different from, Geneviève Asse’s diptychs and
triptychs – one could point to the 1948 Two Edges, or Onement III
(1949) or The Voice (1950) – Newman, then, is felt to offer work that
‘reveals to our gaze in a single sweep’, but Asse distinguishes his con-
ception of art, based on rupture, radical newness, from her own,
steeped in art’s tradition – and, perhaps particularly and understanda-
bly, the French tradition. The balance and elegance of Braque, for ex-
ample, are admired in his engraved as well as his painted work. Picas-
so’s endless inventive power and sheer technical skill, once again, as
engraver and not only as painter, is brought home to her, whereas in
Matisse there is a ‘simplicity’ and a ‘pure beauty’, clearly made to
please Geneviève Asse, who is equally sensitive to Matisse’s ability to
offer ‘painting at one with line-drawing’, a perfect imbrication of part
and whole. Perhaps more surprising is Asse’s attention to the interiors
of Bonnard, until we understand that what especially attracts her gaze
are ‘the goldennesses of the air’, the artist’s alertness to the elusively
modulated colourings of light. Monet’s fin-esse, too, is noted – per-
haps Asse has in mind the Rouen cathedral paintings, the real ever
evanescent, shimmering and shifting in time’s radiance? – and artists
closer to her such as Nicolas de Staël and Raoul Ubac are in her ample
mind, the former no doubt for that capacity for cancelling absolutes of
abstraction and figurativity one can observe – Asse herself cites no

particular pieces – in, say, his 1953 Agrigente or La Cathédrale, com-
pleted in the year of his death, 1955. As for Ubac, Asse is drawn to his
engravings on slate that remind her both of the ancient inscriptions in
the grotto on the Île de Gravinis and of the degree to which she deems
all engraving to constitute an act of writing, a visceral inscribing of
self upon the matter of the earth. The arguably ascetic, spartan quality
of Geneviève Asse’s own extensive engraved work, work that yet at-
tains to an elegantly and modernly understated and unembellished ex-
cellence, does not disallow her high appreciation of the engravings of
a Mantegna (: perhaps his stunning Elephants?) or a Rembrandt (with
his great and moving range of attention: Sleeping Puppy, Beggars re-
ceiving Alms at the Door of a House, Woman Reading, and so on) or
even, closer to her own gesture, a Seurat. It is Goya, however, for
whom she expresses her most fervent regard, whilst ever sensitive to
the techniques and beauties of other great painter-engravers such as
Seghers (: his Ottavio Picclomini is a tour de force, of course, though,
as we have seen, portraiture had rarely drawn Asse herself).
Undoubtedly, as we turn to questions of preferred manners,

modes and materials, the dominance of the colour blue in Geneviève
Asse’s painted oeuvre is foremost in our minds. She does not associate
it with the work of her contemporary, Yves Klein, whom she deems
more intellectually motivated, ever seeing herself as the instinctual,
the spontaneously developing and acting quasi-autodidact. Nor does
she herself root the blues of her art in precise manners, Greek, Islamic,
for example, as Jean Leymarie has yet shown them to be. Charles Ju-
liet see the ‘Asse blue’ as hovering ‘between night and day’ and it is
true that it has by no means a stabilised chromatic quality, being con-
stantly hybridised in the most subtle ways to provide it with vibration
and energy. Nor is it simply a matter of modulating slate blue with
cobalt and/or aquamarine, for it is a blue absorbing and emitting a full
but superfinely deployed gamut of pinks, reds, creams, whites, princ-
ipally, but often barely perceptibly. ‘Infinite divergence’, in short, as
Germain Viatte suggests, at the heart of what others can see only as a
pure azure chromatics. ‘Depth’ and ‘hope’ are the values Geneviève
Asse herself tends to ascribe to the latter, in a sense piercing through
matter to its otherness, perhaps in that in harmony with André du
Bouchet’s observation: ‘blue // the name of the colourless’, or, revers-
ing his equation, the colour of the unnameable. Whether we are look-
ing at her 1987 Nu bleu, her 1990 Sans titre I or her 2001 Deux verti-
cales rouges, Geneviève Asse’s blue draw us deep into its serene vor-
tex, into worlds beyond paint and its nominations.
The second most striking aspect of Geneviève Asse’s work,

her painting, her engraving and even her design work, is her sensitivi-
ty to and exploration of space. Space, however, not as a solid, ab-
solutely measurable entity, but open, fluid, expansive, never a space of
entrapment. Space, but an art beyond dimensionality, a painting ‘be-
tween things’, Asse can maintain – things, such as boxes, doors, per-
haps, or just lines, but also things not visible, in fact, largely not vis-
ible, beyond all framing the work may offer. The 1980 Sans titre I
mentioned above, for example, gives us a kind of ‘overall’, but infin-
itely subtle within the space of its shimmering chromatics and, impli-
citly, in its invitation to dream its endless ‘without’, the ‘secret face’,
as André Frénaud would say, of its givenness. Lines, horizontal, ver-
tical, bands, diptychs, triptychs do not constitute a geometry of closed
form in Asse’s work. They allude to material, physical appearance,
but they point to only occasional markers in the midst of a vast, impli-
citly infinite and enigmatic spaciousness. Asse can enjoy the echoes
and relationships of such spatial markers, the equilibria and harmonies
they can orchestrate, but her geometrics ‘isn’t [really] one, something
made from light perhaps’, she suggests. Even her natures mortes at-
tract not just for the scrutiny of their spatialised contents, but for a ‘si-
lence’ and a deep, residual ‘simplicity’ that exceeds, it would seem,
insistence upon composition and spatial relationality. The ‘architec-
ture’ of her painting is fundamentally ‘secret’, and, if Geneviève Asse
desires it to be so, as she indeed does – line and its architectural quali-
ty should be inscribed in painting, be utterly at one with the latter – it
is, I should argue, because her sense of space, despite her appreciation
of formal harmonies, remains attuned to its ungraspableness, its ra-
tionally unrepresentable nature. Her 1969 Peinture, for example, re-
sorts to its title to emphasise precisely this, just as her 1972 Chemin de
lumière III, whilst evoking both semantically and plastically a logos of
spatiality, yet plunges this logos into the transcendent enigma of light,
or her 1971 Île, once again spatially suggestive via its title and beauti-
fully concordant in its chromatic unfoldment, yet urges us to expe-
rience its space and all space as a phenomenon only symbolically ac-
cessible. Structure may reveal itself in engraving through its reliance

on firm spatialising line, but it should be remembered that Geneviève
Asse’s engraved work is dominated by white space,3 a blankness that
argues implicitly the precarious relativity of all structure, all those
contents of space – of reality, of being, we might be prepared to say –
that her painting will slowly but surely tend to erase to the advantage
of an ontology and an aesthetics of unassuming ineffableness. Asse
has spoken of the ‘breathing’ of the line in her work, no doubt think-
ing particularly of her painting: a breathing that is not a speaking, not
a solid, firmly articulated argument about spatiality and its intrinsic
orchestration, something infinitely softer, more vulnerable even, ‘giv-
ing meaning/orientation’, offering a ‘vibration, a kind of musical res-
onance’, she can muse, but in a language of poetic, intuitive silence.
In 1997 the Musée de Vannes organised an exhibition featur-

ing ‘the decorative arts in the work of Geneviève Asse’, an exhibition
allowing for a much larger appreciation of the creative diversity of an
artist known above all for her painting. Carpets, tapestries, stained
glass, vases, collaborations with poets in the production and illustra-
tion of books offering their work: the range of involvement is signifi-
cant, and it is an involvement that, with respect to the work with poets
and stained glass design, has continued most recently and, as Marie-
Françoise Le Saux has rightly argued, largely pursues, but in diverse
manners, ‘a same exploration of space, transparency, colour’. Asse
has claimed a fascination with the many materials she has worked
with, silk carrés for Bianchini-Ferrier of Lyon, the endless range of
paper used in the production of her prints, the use of particular colours
in preparing designs made to modulate the light of stained glass in Al-
bi (1976), in the Saint-Dié Cathedral in the 1980’s, for the Collégiale
de Lamballe in the late 1990’s, where she collaborated with Oli-vier
Debré. Her special blue, ever variegated, shifting in tone and com-
plexity and, in that, as I have suggested, unlike KIein’s copyrighted
blue, can find its place on a delicate Sèvres vase, on exquisite but
more rugged carpets, her first Ouverture II, being made in 1967 for
the Gobelins factory, her 1984 creation, Ligne bleue, for the Tapis de
la Savonnerie de Lodève being equally memorable, as simple, as pure,
3
Charles Juliet likes that ‘friendly armature of black’ in the midst of the vast white
space of the engraved work (in Mason: Geneviève Asse, 1998).
as sure-footed in its conception as the majestically deployed single

sweep of brilliant cobalt of her 1992 Rhuys for the Gobelins. Howev-
er, lest we imagine that blue is an absolute, let me mention the charm-
ing, busy textile designs done earlier in Geneviève Asse’s car-eer,
such as the Motif aux figures bleues, ocres et carreaux rouges or the
lovely modern classicalness of her Motif aux lignes ocre-rose, deli-
cate, elegantly and deceptively simple, or again, the striking Motif aux
pichets et bustes sur fond noir with its blues and reds starkly silhouet-
ted and, as ever, attention given to global orchestration of form and
colour in a space, decorative, it is true, though never situatable.
A very significant element of Geneviève Asse’s plastic ges-

ture over the years has been her involvement with the book. Her first,
though private venture in this regard goes back to 1947 when she
painted and ink-sketched, as any of us might be tempted spontan-
eously to do, in the margins of a copy of Francis Ponge’s Carnet du
bois de pins, but she tells us too that her many later collaborations
with poets are intimately connected with her own carnets, which, be-
gun in 1943, still continue today.4 ‘Interludes’ in her work as painter
and engraver she may well deem her carnets to be, but they number
more than sixty today and are painted, textless diaries of all sizes often
offering images of ‘the simplest things of nature’, she tells Silvia Ba-
ron Supervielle, but equally capable of the most beautifully elegant
‘abstract’ but viscerally surging forms such as that shown with its red
instinctual-cum-meditative jottings at the 2006 Musée des Beaux-Arts
de Quimper Exhibition (cat. fig. XVII) or, again, the Rythme diary of
1995, exhibited in 2008 at the Musée Lambinet in Versailles, this time
revealing one vast, continuous brushstroke running through the diary’s
Chinese-style concertina-ed pages to its explosive climax of a blue
and purple ‘overall’, followed by an epilogue, so to speak, of white
and blue flecking. Interludes, then, yes, and never preparatory acts
thinking of larger oils to come; but significant life-long gestures that,
one trusts, one day may be shown in their coherent and hybrid entirety
and appreciated in the fullness of their independent and interconnected
plastic beauty.
4
Diaries that the artist was kind enough to show me in her studio.
The movement from carnet to illustrated book comes, howev-

er, largely through Geneviève Asse’s love of paper, its strict materiali-
ty, her family’s connection with publishing and writing, her sensitivity
to the long tradition paper represents. And, of course, through her en-
counter with Pierre Lecuire with whom half of her books have been
made. A sensitivity to formatting, to the book’s architecture, at once
globally and with respect to the visual harmony of a given single page,
to the oblique, never flatly illustrative, but intuitively sensed relation-
ship between written text and plastic gesture – these qualities are ever
manifest whether her gesture seeks to meld and fuse with the poetry of
André Frénaud, André du Bouchet, Silvia Baron Supervielle or
Borges. L’Air, for example, a book gathering work by Lecuire, leads
to Asse’s own aerations, twelve drypoints, light, soaring, she feels,
upon the ‘joy’ of the Chine paper used to deploy the nine cahiers of
the 1969 livre d’artiste. The 1989 edition of Yves Bonnefoy’s Début
et fin de la neige is, for Asse, ‘a kind of precious diary-like book’, of-
fered as a Chinese folded work with its prints and oils and use of pho-
totype, a book moreover of which Bonnefoy reveals the perhaps sur-
prisingly near-ekphrastic quality, ‘the poem in several of its parts [be-
ing] almost born from your maquette in which architectural elements
appear but equally dissipate’. Geneviève Asse’s 1977 work with
André Frénaud, resulting in the beautifully conceived and executed
drypoint and diamond-point engravings for his powerful poem of
passing and ‘inheriting’, Haeres, succeeds in maintaining all of the
painter-engraver’s most distinguishing qualities whilst subtly marry-
ing, with her stela-like tombal forms, now luminous, now blue-aqua-
tinted, the strange sacredness of death’s imbrications with life. The
1972 engravings offered Samuel Beckett’s Abandonné, on the other
hand, attain to a formal, engraved minimalness perhaps echoing the
voidedness of abandonment, yet emphasising, for Beckett as for Asse,
that residual human doing, that conscious, persistent poiein awaiting
the unravelling of the logic of being’s tribulations and often improba-
bly compensating energies. Of course, collaborations such as these
arise from mutual respect and a recognition of ontological affinities
which an exchange of aesthetic gestures may honour and celebrate;
there is no need to mutually analyse, for all such creative gestures are
predicated on the deep and essential authenticity of the individual art-
ist’s/writer’s liberty. Thus, to collaborate with André du Bouchet in
making a livre d’artiste edition of Ici en deux (1982) requires far less
a detailed critical decoding of his complex text than a global apprecia-

tion of his oeuvre, as well as a sense of the manner and mode of his
inscription of self in the world via his chosen medium, (the) language
(of poetry).5 The eleven works retained to accompany André du Bou-
chet’s characteristically splayed but continuous text thus reveal dis-
creet, ever changing motifs of division, partition – but connection, joi-
nedness, too, in the macrospace ‘here’ –, motifs of the earth’s horizon-
tality and that verticality Geneviève Asse sees, in lines, stelae, as the
sign of what Frénaud too regarded, in Ubac’s sculptures, as that stand-
ing, enduring human presence in the face of adversity or plain onto-
logical mystery. Asse’s work, eleven pochoirs binding together
Borges’ ‘long, strong book’, Les Conjurés (1990), opts for a vermilion
red inspired by Picasso’s accompanying of Reverdy’s posthumously
published Le Chant des morts, as wonderful a poème d’adieu as one
might hope to write. A rare red to mark the coruscating power of
theme and articulation of Borges’ Les Conjurés – which, too, turns out
to be a poem of last rites –, it is a colour that can suddenly surge forth
from, as Françoise Quignard writes, the hand of a ‘painter centred on
life more than theories’: a visceral choice, like that informing a 2001
carnet or finding its minimal place in paintings such as the 2003 Cer-
cle I (with its thin vertical red band halving-joining the as ever tonally
hybrid blue), the 2003 Fil rouge (with a central vertical band that in-
cludes a tenuous red thread, as well as the thinnest but smallest of red
bases for this stela-within-a-stela, where blue yet dominates) or, again,
her curious 2001 Cercle rouge (a drypoint and burin print, highlighted
by a vertical and rectangular vermilion aquatint containing the faintest
echo of the circle and fanned half-circle above, the whole a most deli-
cate balance of symmetry and slight displacement).
We now have a fairly clear picture of the principal chosen

creative modes of Geneviève Asse, both respectful of long traditions:
oil painting and engraving. Let me add here, however, before turning
our attention to a more focussed and probing examination of the why
and the meaning of an art still puzzling some, two observations.
Firstly, oil painting never opts for thick application, this, no doubt,
5
For other imbrications of André du Bouchet’s work with artists and poets, see my
Altérités d’André du Bouchet: de Hugo, Shakespeare et Poussin à Celan, Mandelstam
et Giacometti (Rodopi, 2003).
being part of an overall desire for transparency and the subtle shimmer
of chromatic reality, and perhaps connected with a determination to
paint exclusively in that natural light whose ever shifting modulations
dovetail so intimately with her own aesthetics of myriad tonality with-
in constancy. Secondly, whilst the act of engraving can lead many art-
ists to emphasise finesse and multiplication of line, Geneviève Asse
invariably opts for delicacy, understatement, an ‘ancient writing’ – as
she deems etching to be – that, in its amplification of ambient white
space, reminds us of the discretion, the tentativeness and the secrecy,
of all inscription, whether light-fingered skimming of the surface of
the plate, or more deeply scouring, digging literally, into the enigma
of matter to reveal some small trace of the latter. Modes and a physi-
cality of doing that fuse seamlessly with what we may view as art’s
ontological pertinence as I shall now seek to characterise it for the
painter of Lumière - Sénanque (1971) or Diagonale (1988).
That the work of Geneviève Asse – from, by way of example,

her 1969 oil Portes cercle to her 2003 oil Verticalité, from her 1942
lithograph Objets à travers une vitre to her 1999 drypoint and aquatint
Rouge fleur – moves between tenuousness and relative monumentality
(though never at all on the scale of a Garouste or the installations of a
Louise Bourgeois or an Annette Messager), between constancy and
non-fixity of format, chromatics and (a)representation, suggests that a
major motivational criterion, hybrid but unified, is a desire for a new-
ness ever infused with a sense of fidelity. Although her gestures she
will rightly deem to be ‘all one’, each remains as unique as every flake
of snow. In a similar way, her early work, centred on the nature
morte, is thoroughly imbricated with the ever varying interiors that
will ensue, these, in turn, being inseparable from the art of the 1970’s
on, which, though so frequently deemed abstract, is as deeply embed-
ded in an intuitive knowledge and intimate experience of the real as
are the early objects, ateliers, windows, and so on. All Asse’s art, in
brief, finds its rich and elliptically meaningful maximality within a
capacity, inherited from her Breton childhood, to see plenitude, beau-
ty, happiness at the heart of what we all too quickly may dismiss as
minimal or simply bypass in haste. Asse’s spontaneity of execution,
too, allied to her supposed incapacity, which I take to be a desire,
‘never to radically modify or correct’, suggests also a deep will, and
willingness, to be free of finicky constraint, regret and even guilt, to
find in the moment of poiein, of doing, a sufficient joy, at once of sur-

prise, of harmonisation of gesture and instinct, of pure and honest
coincidence with her total emerging being. Conception and pertinence
do not so much precede, as theoretical constructs; rather do they be-
come synonymous, simultaneous, with the very act of creation-cum-
self-creation, the latter blossoming at once as a disruption, a tearing
free from the pre-existing (to which the artist remains yet conjoined),
and as a reequilibration whereby newness finds its place within the
vast unfoldment of art and being, Asse’s, the entire earth’s. The taut-
ness (of line, forms, format, etc.) many can point to in an art certainly,
as we have seen, sensitive to orchestration, a seeming geometry of
presence and its contents – such arguable tautness yet fuses, in Gene-
viève Asse’s work, with what I can only term a fundamental tender-
ness. To paint and to engrave thus entails concentration, discipline,
extemporaneous attention to a kind of profound mathematics of the
real producing configurations, embodiments, formal, aesthetic rela-
tionships, anatomies of presence. Yet, simultaneously, to paint, to en-
grave, is a gesture that leaps, as it were, through the mirror of form
into the formlessness underpinning it, thus becoming at ease with
questions (that become non-questions) of representation, specific say-
ing, meaning: the tender embrace thereof is resolution enough and re-
sponds to any ‘why’ of Geneviève Asse’s plastic art. Thus do formal,
aesthetic, even intellectual values meld completely in works such as,
say, Ouverture lumière (1973-74) or the previously mentioned Fil
rouge (2002), or, again, the beautiful print, oil and phototype creations
for Yves Bonnefoy’s Début et fin de la neige – meld completely, that
is, with barely sayable spiritual and ontological values, pertinence and
motivation. Whether it is an exquisite engraving such as that done for
the 1969 Livres de Pierre Lecuire (with its quick, evocative delicacy
of line), or the 2001 oil on paper Deux verticales rouges (where lines
feather, their ‘imperfection [becomes their] summit’, as Yves Bonne-
foy might say), precision sheds its need for absoluteness, the real (of
being and of art’s materialised forms) is embraced in its shimmer, its
depth, its intuited but never truly speakable knownness. It is a wonder-
ful accomplishment, a giving of meaning where no precise naming
thereof is feasible. An art of interiorness in more ways than one. No
wonder Geneviève Asse tells us that ‘one can’t learn to paint’: no sys-
tem, no model, no imitation: all becomes self-discovery, a finding of
the self, and self’s poietic, self-inscriptive power, in the midst of the
real’s impalpable sureness. An art, then, buoyed up by a deep motiv-

ation, of intimacy, of intimate engagement with the presence of what
is in the silence of the teeming discourse of its energy. The seeming
bareness of Asse’s art, its discretion and its soberness: these are the
manners of its, and her, intense jubilation. A jubilation of the inscribed
transparency of the ineffableness of the experience of the real. And
blue, in its non-absoluteness, yet its trembling orientation of Asse’s
inner gaze, as the vast medium of her acquired serenity, her joy, a
coincidence with the self’s ease and her sense of a profound, but up-
lifting mystery somehow strangely ‘writable’, beyond words.
Three works, all oils, of varying formats, around which to fo-

cus some words of conclusion: Geneviève Asse’s 1943 Hommage à
Chardin (23 x 35 cm), her 1978 Espace (150 x 150 cm) and her 2002
Entre la lumière (245 x 125 cm). The earliest of these three paintings
offers forms reminiscent of, but not definitively attributable to ident-
ifiable objects; perspective, flattened, gives way to purely plastic
space; a limited but delicately shifting, vibrant palette of blues, greys,
ocres is chosen, lit by an earthy red sweep; firm geometry yields to a
liberating personalised harmony; the title speaks of an art given over
to the things of the earth, yet the painting itself pulls us into its own
glimmering, discreet alchemy, ever hinting at the strangeness, but the
beauty too, of being’s contents. Espace, employing collaged blue oil
on paper framing bands of slightly varying width both left and right of
the substantial central ‘panel’ of what we may deem a window, or
door-like, opened retable, is the epitome of a simplicity become syn-
onymous with, not so much rationalisable complexity, decodable gi-
venness, but rather, the sheer ineffable mystery of light, space, atmos-
phere, indeed beingness itself, the central panel plunging us into a
space/no-space – that non-lieu we have seen Titus-Carmel call it – of
whiteness flecked and melded with the softest traces of the collaged
blue bands. The pure azure, a Mallarmé might see through this pseu-
do-window; the intoxication of poetical or mystical space, others
might sense or dream, along with a Baudelaire. Entre la lumière re-
sembles the various stelae Geneviève Asse has given us in recent
years, but its monolithic verticalness is sliced down the middle by a
varyingly luminous white line shadowed by, even fused with, another,
bluish-grey, giving to the large two-panelled space a thin ascensional
betweenness that, oddly, seems to contradict the title’s assertion: sure-
ly, we ask, is not the light between the opaquish-blue panels – unless
we read the title as a dramatic, theatrical inverted statement: enter
light. Once more, it would be inadequate to see a painting such as this
as founding a plastic space of simply formal, structural, architectural
qualities and implications. However, if Valérie Lagier is correct in
saying, as I believe she is, and as Asse herself can suggest, that this is
an art ‘lead[ing] the gaze towards a beyondness of painting’, this
beyondness has no firm delineation, for, whilst intimately obeying a
living sensibility, it generates silence, unspokeness, unsayableness ra-
ther than solidified discourse. None of these paintings, and characte-
ristically, carries with it a neatly articulated moralism, an ethical les-
son attached to the earth’s, to society’s specificities. None pour forths
a lyricism either of anguish, horror, ennui, or, for that matter, of de-
fined pleasure, delight; though, equally, there is no avoidance of sen-
sibility’s subtleties. If form and space can fascinate, they lead to no
brisk and depersonalised mathematicisation. No fear is visible of a
seemingly limited concentration of modes, methods, materials, for
such is the avenue accessing the self’s deep uniqueness. No fear of
past tradition, nor any wild and wilful experimentalism; no aesthetic
provocation, nor any reluctance to audaciously explore an espoused
‘marginality’. No gratuitous play, but, then, no hesitation to see her
plastic gesture as affording freedom and spontaneous adventure. Fur-
ther, far further, than a strictly aesthetic agenda, there lies, ever widen-
ing and deepening, an agenda of coincidence with the intimate, silent
truth of immersion in earth’s, in incarnation’s, mysterious, even sac-
red, ‘presence’, a presence ever contemplatable, infinite, beyond
anecdotalness, beauteous in its strange transparency that fuses with
energies beyond, but somehow at the centre of hard materiality. A
visual art of the invisible.
HYGIENE, THOUGHT, QUEST, CONSENT:
MARTIAL RAYSSE
Didier Semin reaches the conclusion, at the end of his excel-

lent 1992 essay, Martial Raysse, alias Hermès: la voie des images,
that ‘the spectacle of his paintings is one of the most sumptuous and
most troubling one can witness today’, a conclusion it would be diffi-
cult to disagree with given the luxuriant wealth of image and object
Raysse’s oeuvre generates, from the earliest masks and Prisunic as-
semblages, to the technicolour transform ations of a pseudo-pop art
and the phantasmagorical ostentations of his films and videos, and
down to his intimately lived contemporary allegories and myths,
whether of Buddha or Bacchus or some new utopian Republic. I
should add, simply, and despite Philippe Dagen’s sense of the disturb-
ing carnavalesque quality of the more recent work, that Raysse’s sup-
erbly diverse yet unified gesture, that of a ‘most rare poet’ as Cocteau
wrote in the earliest of days, troubles far less than it provokes thought,
urges us to think our relation to the real, both microcosmic, daily phe-
nomena and the macrocosm in which the latter deploy themselves, in-
deed invites us even to consent to energies of ease, embrace and free-
dom that dominant ideologies may discourage us from sensing to be
available to us. Martial Raysse’s art is an art that, from the outset and
with the same intensity today, seeks always to measure its own perti-
nence and purpose, this not merely at all in aesthetic terms, but, too, in
a large existential and – in the broadest sense of the term – spiritual
perspective. His work has led to numerous contacts with, and contem-
plations of, other major contemporary artists as well as to a meditation
of the significance, now, for the ever shifting modernity we are living,
of the various démarches of artists and great masters of art’s long his-
tory. Initially hailed by Ben Vautier, who awards him the Prix du La-
boratoire 32, a prize Ben surely would dearly have preferred to offer
to his own smilingly egotistic self, then close to Arman above all in
what Claude Rivière called the École de Nice, Raysse neither moves,
finally, in the direction of Fluxus nor lingers long with the nouveaux
réalistes and their privileging of a direct, non-lyrical, non-figurative,
non-abstractive apprehension of the elements of the real. Raysse’s
creative trajectory, whilst intersecting with much contemp-orary and
indeed earlier artistic production fruitfully, at times provocatively,

contestatarily, though always thoughtfully and with an understanding
of epochal difference, soon begins to mark out its own probing, ever
developing distinctiveness. His encounters with Niki de Saint Phalle
and Jean Tinguely in New York allow appreciation of the other and a
further catalyzing of his own growing ‘hygiene of vision’. Not dissi-
milarly, the impact of the work of Rauschenberg and Oldenburg,
though stimulating and permitting a sensing of affinities, will not dis-
tract Raysse from a meticulous thinking through of his own potential –
and the same may be said with regard to the orientations implicit in
Warhol’s pop art or Pollock’s abstract expressionism, orientations he
was able closely to examine in his various long stays in the USA in
the 1960’s. His own work of this period, the 1964 Made in Japan se-
ries, for example, or the wonderful 1966 Express certain Psychologi-
cal Definitions: and so what about the chicken?, reveals a post-
Baudelairian ‘painter of modern life’ boldly, half-impertinently but
ever fully pertinently, plunging into the great works of Ingres and
Cranach, Ghirlandaio and Tintoretto, or else the supermodel images of
the day, transforming, ironising, inventing, pointedly and mirthfully
unveiling at once past and ultramodernity to those who might see bey-
ond the gloss and subtexts of both. Of course, comparisons are odious,
and many have been hinted at in the case of Martial Raysse. Hélion,
Chirico, Dix, Didier Semin has invited us to contemplate, not without
relevance though every specific detail of Raysse’s work, from, say,
the 1963 Le Rêve, the 1978 Spelunca series or his 1990 Georges et le
Dragon seems finally to defy such sympathetic assertions.1 Raysse has
his own admirations and hesitancies: the latter, for example, with Ma-
tisse and Mondrian for their flattening of that perspective into which
Raysse’s art finally grows; the former with, say, Dossi or Poussin or
Da Vinci, for their conveyance of telluric depth, nuance, the implicit
plenitude of incarnation. Alain Jouffroy has been tempted to go so far
as to affirm Raysse’s orchestration of an ‘anti-Cézannian revolution’
in his placing of ethics before form, and, it is true, Raysse’s evaluation
of Vuillard’s art privileges, over any com-positional merits it may
possess, the meaning of colour’s sensuousness, its, I should argue, im-
plicit penetration into the visceral-cum-spiritual beauty of earthy expe-
1
See Selected Bibliography. No personal website is available, but www.art-
cyclopedia.com offers many online leads.
Hygiene, Thought, Quest, Consent: Martial Raysse 89
rience. As we shall observe, Martial Raysse’s ongoing ‘hygiene of vi-

sion’ tends to sweep away all but his own equations, allowing him to
view the collective poietic gestures lived and still behind the 1974 Co-
co Mato works as just as deeply pertinent as the vast richly, often
enigmatically, ever stimulatingly allegorical canvases of the 1990’s,
Le Carnaval à Périgueux (1992), for example, or Mais dites une seule
parole (1995) or, again, La Folie Antoine (1999). If the teeming speci-
ficities of Raysse’s art quickly and rightly flood our consciousness,
urging us to sense a marked distance from, say, François Morellet’s
mathematics, Louise Bourgeois’ projected anxieties, or Claude Vial-
lat’s seemingly abstracting a-signatures, and, just possibly only, a
glimmer of connection with Jean-Pierre Pincemin’s ultimate desire for
an oeuvre ‘of generosity, of ampleness’, with the ethico-spiritual un-
derpinnings of Gérard Garouste’s démarche, it may be said to remain
true that all such specificities – to which I shall now attend – all such
differences, all such shimmering interfiguralities, somehow find their
point of convergence in art’s, in the artist’s, endless tussle with what
Gérard Titus-Carmel has termed our ‘presence to the world’.
The various works of Martial Raysse’s Hygiène de la Vision,

together with the writings that have parenthetically accompanied the
series, lie at the operational and notional centre of his most publicly
acclaimed period. ‘A new, pure, aseptic world’ of art he felt himself to
be inaugurating, and who would argue against him when gazing upon
works such as Arbre (1959) or Supermarché, magie multicolore
(1960) or the gathered pieces of the 1960 Étalage Hygiène de la Vi-
sion. No wonder Raysse saw the Prisunic stores as the museums of a
new age. Creation as previously conceived seemed barely necessary
when it preexisted out there, everywhere, and just required a gesture
of showcasing in all of its serenity and unalterableness – factors serv-
ing, moreover, as a subtext to Raysse’s flight from the visible disor-
derliness of poverty and the anxiety of mortality. ‘The theory of the
École de Nice, he argued, is that life is more beautiful than anything’
– a theory, like the root notion of a ‘hygiene of vision’, that, in its var-
ious avatars, will not ever be released: the recycling of discarded ma-
terials of the 50’s, the embrace of the amazing explosion of consumer
goods in the 60’s, the wild, ludic jubilancy of both his 1962 Raysse
Beach installation and the equally exuberant imaginative extravangan-
za, at once farewell and new vision, of his 1970 film Le Grand
Départ, the simplicities of doing and being works like Loco Bello will
emblematise throughout the 1970’s, the welcoming of life’s often
scruffy but sure energies in works such as the 1991 Enfance de Bac-
chus, the many portraits, both soft, easeful and harder-edged of the
1990s`s and into the new millennium: all such work points to a privi-
leging of life’s extraordinariness, its astonishing offeredness, over art
as an act and place of either somewhat aloof disconnectedness or fla-
grant transcendence of the immanent. The Hygiène de la Visison work
proper is predicated on ‘propositions’ and working ‘hypotheses’ and
will eventually lead to his idea put into practice of une forme en li-
berté, whereby simplification, evacuation of all but fundamental line,
a kind of sterilisation of form will allow for a freedom of imaginative
self-insertion into a voided structure that yet provides the occasion of
some paradoxical enrichment, as with arte povera or certain minimal-
isms.
But, lest we imagine such a conclusion to his ultimately – and

in the best sense of the term – experimental work of the early 1960’s
is too theoretical, too purely notional, let us not forget, firstly, that this
‘new conception of the world’ is driven by a powerful desire boldly to
engage both materially, plasticly, and in socio-ethico-political terms
with the earth’s hypermodern becoming, and, secondly, with a need,
even greater, and never ending, to, as he put it in his 1984 beautifully
titled address to the audience at the Musée national d’Art moderne,
‘see more clearly’:2 there is, in works like De l’autre côté du cerceau
(1976) or L’Échange (1978), no surrender, no acquiescence, for here,
as throughout all of the work to come and right down to the present,
we have an art and a gesture free, meditative, in turns and often simul-
taneously smilingly, gently sardonic and enthused, ever thinking and
rethinking its own experience and unending Rimbaud-like ‘invention’
of life’s ways of meaning and purpose. Just as the 1960 Colonne en
cosmonaute moves on from the masks and mobiles of the 1950’s,
without denying them, moreover, so does Cela s’appelle l’aurore
(1964), in the midst of Raysse’s early hygienics and ‘high tension’
painting, prefigure series such as Loco Bello (1976) and Un Jardin au
bord de la lune (1980), the existential implications of these paintings
2
The title of Raysse’s address: ‘On a few words about Paul’s first epistle to the Thes-
salonians up until: how long is the road leading to my blonde’.
and drawings and the life experiences significantly underpinning them

being further contemplated, challenged, ‘more clearly seen’ in the
light of a subsequent, perpetually becoming, and I should maintain,
despite certain appearances, profoundly unified ethical, spiritual and
sensual livednesss that will give us works as varied, though polyphon-
ic rather than dissonant, as the 1988 Fontaine de la Place du Marché
in Nîmes, the 1996 Brioche mon coeur or the 1997 Ébauche du lutin
‘chapelle feu’.
In short, Martial Raysse’s entire plastic oeuvre is marked by a

ceaseless capacity of self-awareness, self-critiquing and self-
exploration. Alfred Pacquement and Robert Calle argue that Raysse
never hesitates to switch perception of self, and in consequence to
‘change self’s image’, but, of course, there is nothing arbitrary in such
self-modification and Alain Jouffroy believes the latter has to do with
Raysse’s ‘capacity for distancing self in relation to his own painting as
in his relation to modern art in general’. ‘Intelligibility’, Martial
Raysse has commonly insisted, should dictate the thought of art. His
Hygiène de la Vision, like the quasi-manifesto he articulates in con-
nection with the various works of this series, powerfully intends such
intelligibility. Whilst not didactic, it already founds that ethics of in-
terrogation, meditation and debate of modernity – i.e. of modern life –
into which later works will continually delve – and, by and large, as
the years go by, the metaphenomenon of commentary will yield a
more or less total place to the direct impact of the plastic, whether this
impact may be deemed more immediately apprehendable as with his
many portraits3 or the Petite Maison paintings of 1981, or less simply
penetrable and decidable as with, for some, Le Carnaval à Périgueux
or even the representationally accessible but enigmatically, though
delightfully, titled Je sais ce qu’il en est de vous mais ... of 1999. In-
telligibility in Martial Raysse’s work, however, implies neither banal
3
Portraiture continues today to fascinate Raysse, witness his Belle sans fin (2006), his
Oui chéri (2008) or his Beauté (2008), the latter two works acrylic on canvas, the first
work mixted technique and collage. All feature female presence, Belle sans fin resem-
bling in more delightfully fluid fashion (gouache and felt pen) his whimsical new
acrylic work titled Re mon cher maître (2007), in itself a ‘remake’ of his early cele-
brated pseudo-pop-art Ingres piece, while Oui chéri and Beauté offer the intensity of
that strange even quirky facial enigma speaking of a human presence a Giacometti
will explore, repeatedly, obsessively, but in radically different ways.
flagrancy nor hermetic esotericism. Rather does it demand an honest

desire and effort to think through life’s strange simplicities, its uplift-
ments and its puzzlements, as well as its forgotten or future possibili-
ties. The ‘intelligence’ Raysse offers is thus often quite implicit and
often increasingly allegorical. What the last two works mentioned fig-
ure precisely in moral, social and spiritual terms remains open, rich,
tantalising, for the Rayssian concept of intelligibleness implies no ide-
ology: it invites, provokes, smiles, always with an odd combination of
intenseness and ease. As Didier Ottinger has suggested, alluding to
Walter Benjamin’s own conclusion, allegory may offer the only poss-
ible efficaciousness of art today in dealing with the ‘disenchantments’
of the contemporary world, and certainly such work by Raysse con-
fronts our large conception of the entire History of Art ‘without
putting a line right through it’, Semin judiciously adds. To speak or
paint publicly, but as an other, via otherness (: allegorein), can allow a
Philippe Dagen, writing in Le Monde, to argue that Le Carnaval à
Périgueux gives us Raysse’s ‘troubling strangeness ... at its peak’,
whilst seeing – seeing clearly – in it a ‘contemporary vision of A Mid-
summer Night’s Dream enriched by allusions to today and personal
allegories’. If this may be deemed so, as indeed it may, then Raysse
may be said to have generated a profoundly rich allegor-ical postmo-
dernity. Not that Raysse seems to harbour any desire to create post-
modern art as such. Art is an avenue to life’s rich poeticity, the asto-
nishing poiein (making, doing, creation) it already contains and which
art’s own poietic gesture may seek to speak as its other.
Martial Raysse never ceases to emphasise both the importance

of art’s relation to life, and, more significantly, the particular nature of
that relation. ‘Painting, he insists, is not an imitation of life, it is a re-
creation.’ In arguing thusly, he joins the great ‘realist’ Balzac, and the
great theoretician of art and poetry, Reverdy. Restructuring of the
elements of the real, making them into ‘objects’, as he calls them,
avoids the illusionism of mimesis. One can think not just here of the
1958-59 plastic boxes that simply gather and encase the given yet in
so doing affirm their appropriation and new distinction, but also of a
more complex shift occurring in, let us say, the 1992 Ceux du maquis
where a certain half-enchanted hyperrealism marries a swirling
strangeness, that kind of dramatic, but unravellable intensity of human
activity other work such as Le Soir Antoine! or Ébauche du lutin ‘cha-
pelle feu’ (1997) also can lay before us. For Raysse, transformation is
the key to the art-life relationship – but not for purely aesthetic rea-
sons at all, rather as a transformation of the lived itself: a changing,
that is, of life itself, by means of a change in one’s (: artist’s and
viewer’s) consciousness of received representation. It is precisely this
poetics and the action stemming from it that distinguishes Raysse’s
incursions into Pop Art from, say, Warhol’s: they are, Véronique Da-
bin argues, ‘more intellectual and satirical than anglo-american pop’.
More ‘utopian’, too, oddly, as Alain Jouffroy is right to observe, but
also more genuinely ludic, at ease, witty. Transformation can be hos-
tile, violent, acidic, but not with Martial Raysse. The ironies of pas-
tiche are visible, yes, and, as Raysse will tell us at the time of his 1985
finely titled Amsterdam exhibition, Martial Raysse, maître et esclave
de l’imagination, inversion, subversion, that is the artist’s domain: a
turning over, around, a provocative (yet caressive, too, for Raysse)
upsetting of our standard, essentially passive and accepting modes of
perception and thinking: to gaze upon – and think through – Étalage
de Prisunic (1961), La Petite Maison (1981), La Surprise (1988) or
Giotto renversé par un porc, is to run through the various modes of
inverting and subverting in which Raysse delights and excels: in all
cases they invite, point to new contemplation, mild or more truly puz-
zling astonishments available, and always do they eschew mere repro-
duction despite the deceptive simplicities they may deploy. Again,
Notre Dame de Bonne Espérance (1981) is a fine example, smiling,
tongue-in-cheek, quirky, yet never gratuitous, for predicated on the
real, deep significance of love’s spiritual and carnal mystery: a sub-
version, in effect, ever uplifting, seeking, as we shall subsequently
show, value, an upheaval that shifts energy from the conceivable un-
dermining of subversion. If Martial Raysse quits his place amongst
the celebrities of the contemporary American and European art world
in the late 1960’s, moved by the 1968 ‘revolution’ back in France, it is
no doubt due to a sense of the power of such a world’s glossiness to
swamp out other socio-ethical ambition his own démarche sought to
maintain and that 1968 seemed, despite its contradictions, to promise
to realise. His founding of a commune, the giving of himself to collec-
tive artistico-existential gestures – ‘our work is we ourselves’, he ex-
plained in a 1972 interview4 –, the subsequent Coco Mato exhibition
4
In Réalités, 139.
of arguably unsophisticated, unpolished, yet motivated ‘things’ (as he

preferred to call them), the marked contemplative intimacy of much
work that follows, as well as the public art where personal ethics and,
in the broad sense, spirituality, meditation on one’s being-in-the-
world-with-others, marries larger social vision: I am thinking, of
course, of his Fontaine for the City of Nîmes, his Sol et Colombe for
the Conseil économique et social on the Place d’Iéna in Paris, his
Derniers Montagnards, all of the late 1980’s, and why not mention his
project for the 1982 Universal Exhibition which he titled Les Chemins
de la Liberté: all of these works, and others, speak to the logic under-
lying Raysse’s only seemingly abrupt turning away from a mode of
artistic performance and a vast materialistic art world machine threat-
ening to drown out, precisely, the kinds of intimate, deeply personal
life projects Raysse’s work implied, and the vision, ever growing as
his work and life matured, which he sought simply, unpretentiously,
yet transformatively, to share with a wider public audience. Reality,
lived, observed realness, the artist’s ‘model’, Raysse tells us, is ever
‘only a means, never an end’: transformation, once again, is at the
core of painting, sculpting, drawing. Art’s gesture: an ever becoming
self-transformative act. The resultant work(s): ‘a sismographic ac-
count, he shrewdly notes, of the psychological variations of the act of
painting as an act of life’. Each work by Martial Raysse, in short, we
may view as nothing more, but nothing less, than a mental-emotional-
psychical-meditative trace or mark, via art, as art, but art as, most im-
portantly, an ‘act of life’, a creation of self, a material deployment, an
actualisation of life’s psychic potentialities.
Such potentialities have been explored in Raysse’s case via a

full range of poietic doing: painting, drawing, film, video, sculpture,
the creation of objects, ‘things’, poetry, other writing, opera and ballet
decors, all involving the use of a significant gamut of techniques. As
for the modes of Martial Raysse’s doing, his poiein, it is largely fair to
say that they are hybridised, interconnective in nature, never inclined
to retreat in some modal isolationism. His ‘painting’ can thus involve
the use of neon, television, photography; his films and videos not only
bear reference to the work of, for example, Delacroix or Ingres – just
as he can say, inversely, of creations such as his 1967 Identité, main-
tenant vous êtes un Martial Raysse, that ‘TV in my work replaces the
madonnas in Da Vinci’s’ – but opt also for that ‘chromatic movement’
to which Patrick de Haas has rightly given weight in noting the fre-
quent indeterminacy of shape and presence at play in Raysse’s cine-
matographic images; the theatrical decors created for Roland Petit’s
1966 Éloge de la Folie and his 1967 Lost Paradise (put on at Lon-
don’s Covent Garden and then the Paris Opera, with Margot Fonteyn
and Rudolf Nureyev) involve spectacular neon colour, a vast painted
multi-panelled illuminated backcloth, modernly simple costumes, too,
for the second ballet, and an application of his painterly technique of
‘variable geometry’; his major sculptures can merge the play of light
and colour, as well as the use of coloured mosaics in the symbols of
the metopas for the Sol et Colombe creation; and so on, with his early
poèmes-objets or his poetic texts accompanying the 1976 Loco Bello
exhibition.
Before looking further at the various techniques that characte-

rise Martial Raysse’s creative manners, it is worth reminding our-
selves of two things: firstly, that, as he most pertinently insists – for it
is all too easy to mistake means for ends, be blinded by them at the
expense of art’s deeper purposes and worth –, ‘the essential lies not in
techniques but in the use made of them’; secondly, that Raysse will
always remain, in consequence, an ‘engineer of vision’, as he
buoyantly remarks, but of a seeing not just flashily or oddly aesthetic,
i.e. not just a seeing of surface effect and shimmer, but a vision pro-
foundly centred on, as I have sought already to emphasize, meaning,
ethics, the fundamental yet swirlingly challenging pertinence of exis-
tence as our ever becoming consciousness may allow us to perceive it.
This said, and in this perspective, I should like to examine, in neces-
sarily most compacted fashion, some eight of Martial Raysse’s diverse
and often innovative techniques:
1: photography is, of course, the most noticeable element of

Raysse’s work of the 1960’s, though it is essentially recycled
photography, as with the Made in Japan series or 1965 pieces
such as his Peinture à haute tension or 14 juillet, Tableau à
géométrie variable, a recycling either of images of anonym-
ous women models or of photo-reproductions of famous
paintings of women, and a recycling not raw, but very much
‘cooked’, a powerfully appropriative and transformative recy-
cling;
2: colour is the means so often in this latter work of such ap-

propriation, and with this appropriation, of a simultaneous
highlighting of modernity’s ‘astonishments’ and ironic sub-
version thereof: colour is brilliant, technicolour, ‘martialcolor’
as he can pushily and wittily write, it can be fluorescent or ap-
plied by a process of flocage whereby plastic fibre paint is
sprayed onto the photograph, uniformising and rendering
somewhat schematic the pseudo-presence of the figure;
3: neon, of course, completes the range of colouring tech-

niques of this period: Peinture à haute tension is again a stun-
ning example, as are the decors done for the Roland Petit bal-
lets;
4: Béatrice Salmon has spoken of Raysse’s ‘hybridising of

painting through cinema’ and it is important to observe not
just this willed slippage from medium to medium, but, to my
mind, once again the remarkable colours achieved, their
blending and consequently produced fusion of forms: few
filmmakers have been so chromatically, and thus a-
mimetically, bold; moreover, as Pontus Hulten has observed,
but here he has in mind the paintings of the 1970-1980 period
such as Loco Bello – Raysse’s work on canvas or paper can
give us ‘brilliant colour not seen since Renoir’ – indeed, just
as Raysse has spoken of the generalisable application of a
concept of form in his 1960’s work, one might argue a similar
complementary logic for the application in his work of a con-
cept of colour, where, incidentally, black can often play a
forceful contrastive role:
5: the materials used in painting and drawing are not in them-

selves exceptional: acrylic, watercolour, industrial and oil
paint, the latter rarely however; pencil, charcoal, pastel; tem-
pera becomes dominant in the 1970’s and remains so today –
a choice demanding deftness and one that is fairly unforgiving
– and relatively inhabitually opted for by artists today. The
surfaces used by Raysse are many: wood, paper, canvas, po-
lystyrene or plywood occasionally, cardboard, thick-glued pa-
per, etc. Both surface and materials may involve a mixture of
techniques: one could point to the tiny (21 x 18 cm) 1965
Pablo, a gouache on photocopy thick-glued onto canvas , with

aluminium and plastic; or to, say, the 1962 mixed media
‘painting’ Miroir aux houppettes, with its assembled objects
(make-up case, powder puffs, mirror, photograph, plastic ac-
coutrements) on paper, variously touched up with paint, and
mounted;
6: assembly and bricolage mark the earlier years rather more,

though if one extends such techniques conceptually to include
not only collage, which becomes a significant technique, but
also what we might think of as compositional assembly of a
heteroclitic nature – Le Carnaval à Périgueux for example,
but, of course, too, the wondrous medly Coco Mato affords,
or, indeed, the undoubtedly unified but fabled heterogeneity
of Martial Raysse’s oeuvre taken as a whole: if we can see
such a principle of gathering and piecing together – did he not
delightfully state to Le Journal de Genève in 1966 ‘I make
anything whatsoever with anything whatsoever’? – as freely
applicable, though ever motivated by Raysse’s visual-
visionary ‘engineering’, then, I believe, we come closer to un-
derstanding the creative modus operandi Raysse ceaselessly
deploys;
7: whilst the frame for Raysse’s painted and drawn work re-
mains in place, it no longer has the binding, constraining cap-
acity of most such work: elements may overflow the limits of
the frame, as with Pablo (1965) or Yellow Rose (1964);
Raysse can offer us the framed piece whilst simultaneously
pointing to and actualising other work outside it, but now
drawn into its frame of reference and function via the en-
largement thereof: 14 juillet, tableau à géométrie variable
(1965) is a fine example, and other techniques of doubling,
leaping beyond the frame, exploding its tightness can be seen:
Souviens-toi de Tahiti (1963), for instance; Nice-Venise push-
es such a practice still further by giving us a large, single, ma-
crocosmic work constituted of thirty or so separately framed
and scattered microcosms, each viewable as a single film-like
‘frame’ of the entire sequence, which yet is a non-linear si-
multaneity; and then there are those many paintings of series
such as Spelunca or La Petite Maison, where the painting
proper chooses, as it were, to de-frame itself, operate a non-

coincidence of available figural space and the figuration giv-
en: individual paintings such as L’Eau, le sang, les fruits
(1978) or L’Hermaphrodite (1977) or again Le Balai (1979)
thus establish their intimate functional and meditative oasis
upon paper or wood, floating patches of dream, vision and al-
legory projected freely into their own microspatial infinities;
8: perspective in modern or postmodern art is a rare choice, of

course, largely because representation is not typically at stake:
it is, yet, a choice that Martial Raysse makes in the early
1970’s, this, moreover, after years of its occultation in a con-
scious gesture of ironising, a-mimesis. To resume perspectival
painting and drawing allows the nuance and the depth of the
real, as well as the implicit connection to the latter, the inter-
connectedness of people and all ambient phenomena, to
emerge to the forefront of the mind. Perspective reengineers
vision, gives us back, for example, those faces Giacometti
sought to live and meditate after his relinquishment of the sur-
realist agenda in the mid-1930’s: Raysse’s multiplying por-
traits, though not cast in some larger perspectival space, yet
convey delicacy of presence and can opt for the sfumato
Raysse admired in, for example, Leonardo da Vinci; his Spe-
lunca and Loco Bello paintings, but also more recent works
such as E.K. (1985) or Brioche mon Coeur (1996), all provide
a view – far from classically perspectival, to be sure – upon
one’s possible relation to what Bonnefoy has called ‘the
things of the simple’, light, trees, the few objects with which
we may have daily intimate contact – one thinks immediately
of the 1981 series, La Petite Maison, human beings in lived
and cherishable place. The black pencil works, too, of 1980,
Un Jardin au bord de la lune, though more classically pers-
pectival and reminiscent of small pencilled pieces after Bron-
zino or Da Vinci, offer carefully caressive traces of close con-
nection to rural, earthy, yet almost cosmic space fervently in-
habited and known. In all cases, including the larger alleg-
orical works, such as the 1989 La Source or the 1999 La Folie
Antoine, perspective implies, more than anything else, the
quest for meaning in self-other and self-world relations, the
latter cast in an optic of friendship and embrace, ethical and

spiritual reflection on our incarnation and the instincts, desires
and purposes we may theatricise via such strange, now troub-
ling, now marvellous being-in-the-world.
One may easily be tempted in examining the full scope of

Martial Raysse’s undoubtedly diversified plastic oeuvre to emphasise
precisely the variables at the expense, conceivably, of the constancies,
elastic as they may be, that yet hold his shifting but principled and
self-rethinking gesture in the surprising coherency I should argue yet
characterises it. We may, for example, be inclined to separate radically
the 1962 Raysse Beach installation from the 1970 painting Le Sage,
but we may also see them as exploring differently perceivable modes
of a meditation of the utopian. Just as the material and the immanent
may be felt to generate at deeper levels an intimate embrace of the spi-
ritual, so do those many paintings by Raysse that give us the imme-
diacy of our dailiness project the latter onto a cosmic backcloth. Le
Pain et le vin (1995) achieves such a synthesis, just as, say, Le Soir
Antoine!5may be said to do so with its swarming scene of human ga-
thering, drama and even violence, in vast space lit by the intense
blood-orange brilliance of a setting sun, and one could argue the sym-
bolic pertinence of all those works that cast their microscenes into
pure white, or again black (as with the [equally Christian] motif of the
bread and wine paintings). In imbricated fashion, what may come
across, as with a Gérard Garouste, as the enigmaticalness of the given
(: one could argue this from the beginning: scrap metal or Prisunic ob-
jects, seen beyond their utilitarian appropriation) is simultaneously
meditated for its symbolicalness: one thinks not just of Raysse’s con-
templation of the symbolism of the (only seemingly) banal in the coat
of arms for the city of Nîmes in his creation of the Fontaine de la
Place du Marché, but, also purely by way of example, of Le Carnaval
à Périgueux, where the puzzling parade of largely dubious human
presence and comportment manifestly implies a discreet but powerful
embrace of the ‘symbolic’ depth of meaning of the latter. Other man-
ifest variables that would seem to suggest a dualistic, binary structur-
ing of Rayssse’s imaginative universe might be said to pit the human
5
A preparatory version of this painting shows a less intensely focussed and slightly
differently orchestrated scene of still high enigmatical turbulence.
against nature, at least radically separating them; or else, via that re-
turn to the subject in art which so strikes Pacquement and Calle in
their introduction to the superb catalogue for the 1992 Jeu de Paume
exhibition, a return also to the subjective, better the relation of self
(Raysse’s, but yours, mine, equally) to the other, any other. What yet
seems clear, I should maintain, is that self and nature are sensed and
lived as no more isolated from one another than are self and other hu-
man beings, despite infinite difference. La Source, for example, ap-
pears to plunge the virginalness of human presence (with its implicit
generative, creative power as represented by the young woman) into
an equally fertile and luminous earthy environment: we are back – no,
we have never truly left it, if we so think: we can go farther than No-
valis’ shattered (though still extant) paradise – in some Eden, some
Origin-Now, of visualised symbiotic harmony. And, I should argue,
more contentiously, even the early Colonne en cosmonaute or the Éta-
lage de Prisunic, whilst querying and no doubt ironising, simulta-
neously are marvelling – at once at the ingenuity of humans, the asto-
nishing material source the earth constitutes, even the conceivable
transcendence of global material poverty the latter seem to promise. If
we return to Le Carnaval à Périgueux or L’Enfance de Bacchus,
where the question of the relation of self to other hovers, perhaps chal-
lengingly, provocatively, over Raysse’s gesture, the residual implica-
tion fuses, I believe, with that of those many other works where col-
lectivity, fraternité, love, embrace of the other seem quite beyond de-
bate: yes, difference reigns, but there is, far from it, no sense of sep-
arateness, superiority, disgust and consequent shying away. If any-
thing, the artistic gesture of going towards the other’s ‘debatableness’,
his or her ‘questionableness’, remains ever a dialogue, a coexistence, a
recognition of sharedness, even a significant embrace of collective
energy and its potentialities. The Chemins de la Liberté sketched
project opens up a space wherein the carnavalesque, the polyphonic
and the different can actualise what Édouard Glissant has thought of
as a ‘poetics of relationality’:6 this would be the fulfilment of the
questing Coco Mato speaks of, or the desire implicit in Raysse’s
Graal paintings. Moreover, portrayals of Zia en Bacchante (1993) or
of Lucien en Bacchus reveal to what degree Raysse does not isolate
the ideal in some tight zone of prudishness or unsmiling disincarna-
6
See Poétique de la relation (Gallimard, 1990).
tion. The only seemingly ‘lower’ variables of playfulness and sensual

joy marry with ease the ‘higher’, more sober motivations that Sol et
Colombe or Jean nupieds, général de l’armée de souffrance (1999) or
Montsalvatché (1984) varyingly dramatise. What we may deem to be
the polarising ironies that can inhabit Martial Raysse’s work – and, to
my mind, they are just as visible in later works such as Le Salut soit
sur la Dame si sage (1999) or Ainsi voici du coeur l’étrange parure
(1999) as in works from the Hygiène de la Vision period – such iro-
nies are utterly undivorceable from that visionariness, that clairvoyant,
oracular, even though delightfully quixotic sense of what lies on the
other side of the ironised. The variable of contestation always, in
Raysse, implies an embrace, a dream, a fervent desire, of embrace.
Together, they form a unified field of psychical energy projected onto
screens both of ambiguity and rich implicitness, screens where what
shines forth, from La France verte (1963) or Paysage champêtre en
15 tons (1963) to the exquisite 1994 Les six plats or the powerful
Danse macabre, chapelle de pierre et feu of the same year, is an ever
searching gaze into self and upon others, a constancy of questing, self-
querying vision via the inevitable ‘variables’ any one moment of ex-
perience and thought can produce.
In the context of what precedes, three further points deserve

our attention: the question of evolution in Raysse`s work, the question
of beauty and the conception of the image. On the first matter, that of
a shift in Raysse`s relation to plasticity, if we take his involvement
with the nouveaux réalistes, clearly we can appreciate that, though
newness may be emphasised, the root fascination and determination
turns about the real: its ongoing rethinkableness or ‘revisionableness’,
as he tends to see it. As early as 1965, and thus in the midst of works
like Made in Japan but also Cela s’appelle l’aurore, in an interview
with Jean-Jacques Lévêque for Arts, Raysse affirms that ‘I thought
vision was a mental phenomenon. Now I only think vision is a senti-
mental phenomenon’. But what was the vision behind the various
works of the 1950’s – Bleu Citron (1957), for example, or the wire
sculptures and the mobiles? Mentalness, senti-mentalness? Ultimately,
these works, like his Made in Japan en martialcolor, but also his
Prairie, childish painting (1964) and the post-1970 works the latter
piece only half-surprisingly may be said to prefigure – all are caught
in the flow of a shifting, vacillating consciousness of the real, now
more intellectually constrained, now more spontaneously emotional.

Le Grand Départ is less a film that marks a radical turning that antic-
ipates what Alain Jouffroy will describe, perhaps excessively, overly
ideologically, as a discovery of everything industrial modernity ‘de-
nies, upsets, masks and pollutes’, than a film (plunged up to its ears in
modern technology) marking Raysse’s continuing, fluid, vigorous but
funkily graceful traversal of the same real. The mutations Raysse op-
erates in his envisioning of his Six Images calmes (1972) points to his
capacity to, at once feistily and serenely, make this traversal, whether
theorised, visceral, sensual or spiritual in the moment. Gilbert Lascault
rightly argues, to my mind, the degree to which Loco Bello, though
‘resituating’ painting, does so without hostility – and it is precisely
this seamlessness that I would have us attend to. What Didier Semin
refers to as Raysse’s ‘initiatory path’ – even though he is thinking
somewhat oppositionally in terms of a sociopolitical critique opening
onto a space of spiritual transcendence – is a useful notion in that we
may perceive the entirety of Raysse’s oeuvre as revealing his own in-
itiation, his ever beginning penetration, into that vast place of multifa-
cetted oneness, beyond all ‘binary reduction’, as Jouffroy now argues,
that is his own consciousness of self and other, via art’s continuous
mediation.
The question of beauty reveals an equal elasticity of apprecia-

tion – an immutableness of sorts, that is, at the heart of its very va-
riables. We cannot know for sure to what degree the very early fabri-
cations and paintings, from the masks to the mobiles to Bleu citron or
Coulée (1960) were held to offer aesthetic power: to the extent they
were made, exhibited, not destroyed, we may assume that something
of the ancient equation of the Good, the True and the Beautiful obtains
in the eyes of Martial Raysse. The images of woman, locus of concen-
tration of beauteousness for so many male artists for so long – not that
this may not be said of Vigée Lebrun or Berthe Morisot – certainly
will powerfully draw the art of Raysse and perhaps most notably, most
publicly, in his pseudo-Pop Art period. Without fetishism, most critics
concur, and, indeed, Raysse, whilst beyond a doubt recognising the
formal beauty of perfectly structured features, can go so far as to
write, in 1965, that ‘beauty is bad taste [...]. Bad taste is the dream of
overly desired beauty’. It clearly is an equation requiring that we think
it through: such beauty, presumably whether lived – better, dreamed –
directly or through painting (: the beauty of the anonymous advertis-

ing models metamorphosed in Raysse’s 1960’s work) would imply the
fetishism he eschewed but which phantasmatically haunts the minds
of so many still today in the proliferation of its purely empty plastici-
ty, if I may put it that way. ‘A work of art, Raysse can clarify in 1971
in Zoom, is not something beautiful to look at [...] its value is in being
a school of thought’: the absoluteness of the fetishising gaze is thereby
replaced by the mobility of a critical meditation of form, exteriority,
whereby the latter is understood to require its placement within a so-
cio-ethico-spiritual framework – not entirely unlike Baudelaire’s ap-
preciation of the ephemeralness of beauty and formal perfection, or
Mallarmé’s understanding in Un coup de dés of the failure of poetry to
evacuate the undesirableness of the real and absolutise beauty. This,
paradoxically, and rightly, does not prevent either Gilbert Lascault
from arguing that Loco Bello is an incitement to gaze upon the beauty
of being, or Françoise Viatte from maintaining that the drawings of
this period, Un Jardin au bord de la lune, for example, constitute a
‘counterweight to poor taste’. And has not Raysse himself affirmed,
beyond contradiction, that the art ... of life demands that ‘one chase
off the idea of death. Through work, through beauty’?
The entire logic of the image is, of course, intimately interwo-

ven with what precedes. The beauty of art’s images above all, Raysse
urges us to appreciate, must be seen through the lens of our con-
sciousness of its illusoriness, its seemingness, with the idolatry it may
readily induce. Didier Semin’s fine essay insists upon Raysse’s art as
a ‘way of images’, and Raysse understands from beginning to end –
and not just, I shoud argue, only in his pastiching, ironic pseudo-Pop
Art period – that he is ‘a painter of simulacra’. Certainly, a work such
as Miroir aux houppettes is a strong reminder that the image of self
produced by a woman’s make-up is a perfect mise en abyme of the
artist’s gesture and product. Of Raysse Beach, Martial Rayse writes:
‘I’ve never done painting. I realised after a while I was working on
image’. Painting or no painting, the artistic mode produces masks, ap-
pearance, contrivance, what we have seen Reverdy call antinature, a
theatre of form – every bit as much as it may be said – but perhaps
quite minimally so – to stimulate reflection on the relation of such im-
aging to life’s deep, and daily, urgencies. When Ottinger suggests that
Raysse’s 1963 Forme en liberté exhibition pieces reach an ‘ultimate
point of vacuousness and insignificance of images’ – and one could

point also to his work, a pure, disembodied outline of head and shoul-
ders, in The Village Voice (19 February, 1970) – it is important to rea-
lise that Raysse is doing two things simultaneously: 1. pushing to their
extreme limits the propositions of his Hygiène de la Vision; 2. laying
before us the intrinsic nature – its void and its critical meditatableness
– of any image: the trap it can lay, and the liberation the mind’s active
engagement with it can offer. In 1992, interviewed in Le Monde,
Raysse tells us – he is thinking of works of the period above all, of
L’Enfance de Bacchus and Le Carnaval à Périgueux, but it is an ob-
servation, I believe, we may think fully applicable to all of his vision-
driven oeuvre – that ‘all these images have a deep meaning’. This, of
course, does not imply some simple equation. When Lascault contem-
plates the Loco Bello tempera paintings, he find himself hard-pressed
to even describe them, so swarming and imbricated are the images
they offer, and, in consequence, their implicitness. Meaning, for the
conscious artist, is everywhere, has its deep impact on the psyche,7
ever speaking of its shimmering relativities as of its wealth of virtual
pertinency.
Not long ago Didier Ottinger wrote that, ‘with an intenseness

unlike any other, Martial Raysse’s art crystallises what is at stake in a
whole epoch’. What is at stake, of course, during and at the close of a
century – indeed at the late dawn of another – of murderous warfare,
religious and ideological tensions, global amplification of material de-
sire, uncertainties as to personal and collective ontology, is the ques-
tion of value, purpose and meaning. Martial Raysse’s work never
ceases to tackle such issues and encourages their conceivable resolu-
tion. Perhaps the principal, most fundamental choice made by Raysse
may be said to be his conscious decision to value, and seek to realise
in his life and reflect in his work, personal happiness. Though this
may seem to be a straightforward choice, it is not one commonly ad-
hered to: either one argues it cannot be a principal objective, or one
feels it to be overly egotistical, thus culpabilising self in harmony with
those accusations that tend to be levelled at joy, out of envy or a sense
of happiness’ irresponsibility. The work of the 1960’s, though shot
7
The ‘function of painting, Raysse can tell us in an interview with Philippe Dagen, is
to intervene in individual psyches’ (Le Monde, 9 août, 1992).
through with Raysse’s understanding of life’s, and art’s, very possible

emptinesses and delusions, yet already powerfully draws on the avail-
able buoyancies, effervescences and exhilarations in life and artistic
gesture. Lascault properly speaks of Raysse’s plain refusal of the trag-
ical, and if, in 1971, in Zoom, Raysse himself is low-key but unambi-
guous in declaring that ‘my aim is very simple. It is to seek happi-
ness’, Jouffroy takes very high ground in arguing that this happiness,
for Raysse, had to be ‘worthy of Saint-Just’. In effect, Raysse under-
stands his aim, his choice, to be a ‘reasoned optimism’ in the face of
pessimism’s temptation: a kind of volonté joyeuse in Buddhist terms,
or a form, as all vigorous activity may be, of self-therapy, as he will
see it in conversation with Otto Hahn – an argument often put forward
to speak of the logic of art or writing: one thinks of Niki de Saint
Phalle or Louise Bourgeois, for example. The charming 1965 sculp-
ture (of metal, plexiglass, neon and bulbs), with its neon arrow guid-
ing the way through the bright red heart, is clearly an offering, to self
and to others, of feasible, creatable, indeed freshly created upliftment.
And later, via the twelve exquisite, relatively small (20.5 x 26.5 cm)
drawings of Un Jardin au bord de la lune, Raysse will tell us that such
works are given to the viewer with the precise aim of ‘returning some-
thing of the happiness I received’ (in the years lived by the banks of
the Marne river – scene of great transformation for a Frenchman, in-
deed). As Semin has nicely put it, art-as-happiness becomes a very
real, if rare ‘kind of manifesto’.8
The value or purpose Raysse may be said endlessly to espouse

in his art, and serenely demand of those who contemplate it with him,
is, furthermore, as we have observed, intimately rooted in thought, a
deep sense of the essential thinkableness of the plastic gesture. More
precisely, this implies, for Raysse, a questing after personal truth.
Véronique Dabin sees the Spelunca series as the ‘result of a long spiri-
tual search’, and if Didier Semin concurs in suggesting that such
works imply a ‘desire to return to the origins of knowledge’, a deci-
8
Renoir is, too, largely, and exceptionally, an artist of joy. Fluxus, equally, has signif-
icant elements of an exuberance yet no doubt somewhat more complex. Poussin’s
evocation of art’s ‘delectation’ tends to evoke rather art’s arising aesthetic jouissance,
but, despite Reverdy’s firm distinction between privileged aesthetic emotion and art’s
abandonment of raw emotion, fusing seems implacable if one seeks it.
sion to ‘reflect on doctrines’, as Raysse himself says in Les Lettres in

1971 – if one cannot disagree with such arguments, I should go further
in maintaining that the entirety of Raysse’s work, ever predicated on
an ever becoming meditative envisioning of the relation of self and
self’s art to the world, constitutes one long, vast mental-sentimental
search – just as André du Bouchet’s entire oeuvre the poet saw as a
single (self-)exploratory sentence. Thinking through ‘origins’ – Budd-
ha, Christ, Western and Eastern ontological traditions – certainly; but,
too, contemplating the meaning of scrap metal, Prisunic consumer
items, the shimmer of photographic images, art’s traversal of all this
and much more, none of this must be sidelined in appreciating what a
thinking quest for ‘spiritual’ knowledge and truth is. The Hygiène de
la Vision works are just as significant as Loco Bello or Un Jardin au
bord de la lune or Giotto renversé par un porc or again the 2007 Heu-
reux rivages9 in our appreciation of Raysse’s declaration that ‘great
painting [...] always speaks of the path of knowledge and universal
love’: intellectual, rational illumination, but, it is important to under-
stand in ‘reading’ Raysse’s work, an illumination beyond mere de-
monstrable logic: instinctual, impulsively sensed, of the spirit and not
just the mind. The intelligibility we have seen Raysse endlessly urge
upon art can, thus, take on a manifest sociopolitical aura – Vuillard’s
‘ruin’ stems from his lack of ‘political structure’, we are told – and the
city, with its heteroclitic groupings, its complex collectivity, clearly
preoccupies Raysse despite his rustic, private proclivities. But intelli-
gibility never implies for him the replacement of the obscure with the
transparent. ‘The aim of painting, he emphasises, is to grasp in a palp-
able manner a reality beyond the material’. Clearly, the task is greater
than the metopas accompanying his Sol et Colombe sculpture would
suggest: Le Carnaval à Périgueux or L’Enfance de Bacchus or La Fo-
lie Antoine point to this tension between the immaterial, complex
thought, vision, sentiment, spirituality, and the palpable. To ‘bear wit-
ness’, as Raysse likes to see his work doing – he admires Delacroix’s
Lutte avec l’ange in the Église St. Sulpice for such a logic of intense
effort of revelation of complex thought, personal truth or knowledge –
is to move simply towards such palpableness, to invite self and other
to contemplate, to commit in the templum of mind-spirit to an act-with
9
With its echoing of ‘bacchanalian’ virtues and earlier specific paintings such as
Raysse’s Bacchus appropriated from Da Vinci (cf, infra).
(cum), the intricate contents of such witness. Broadly speaking, one

could say that such purpose, and the meaning capable of emerging
from it, is of the order of that poeticity Cocteau saw in Martial
Raysse’s work from the outset and that, for all his willing upon
Raysse of a socialist programme, Alain Jouffroy comes also to recog-
nise as determining. It is, despite the power in Raysse of what Julia
Kristeva, after Lacan, calls the ‘symbolic’, the deep residual energy of
the ‘semiotic’ merging with the symbolic that gives the latter its teem-
ing evocative originality.
In effect, although both the early work of Raysse, from the

Étalage de Prisunic and like pieces down to Spelunca, Loco Bello and
even, very much even, the many Bacchus paintings, may vary consi-
derably in the nature of their vision, all contain marked utopian ele-
ments. These may be rationally channelled as with Sol et Colombe
and, above all, its inscribed metopas, or equally pertinently, the Fon-
taine de la Place du Marché, where the firmly felt and consciously
adopted ancient greek ‘virtues’ of adiaphoria and arete are promi-
nently articulated. But if, here, the symbolic shows its power of cohe-
rency and rational modelling, numerous are the works that ride upon
the ‘semiotic’. The sheer multitudinous hybridity, the gathering into a
place of oneness of the heterogeneous, the scruffy, the ‘suspect’, and
the conceivably ‘decent’, even possibly ‘exemplary’, that works such
as Le Carnaval à Périgueux, L’Enfance de Bacchus or La Folie An-
toine varyingly operate – such implicit psychic energies and the swirl-
ing spiritual propositions they may be said flickeringly to convey have
about them something of that ethics of assent – ‘devotion’, Rimbaud
called it – to the bizarreness of all incarnation, its ‘heroicalness’ as
Hugo saw it in the flowing ‘legend of the centuries’. What I am term-
ing utopian in Raysse thus spawns an embrace of the diverse, the ma-
cabre and the luminous, a deferral of the logics of the latter in an in-
clusiveness whereby, as Alain Jouffroy has suggested, others may be
figured in all their ‘strangeness, [perhaps] their solitary abandonment,
their [improbable] dignity’10 – a potential and even already real human
and cosmic harmony whose rational structure escapes us, but which
we may yet sense.
10
My parenthesis.
The Bacchus myth, revisited with that wonderfully refreshing,

relaxed, almost nonchalant Rayssian touch that ensures its distinct
contemporary rethought relevance, may be seen to constitute a high
point of synthesis of Martial Raysse’s aesthetic and, above all, ethico-
spiritual vision and value. ‘A sleight of hand for a very beautiful sto-
ry’, he calls it: like all thought, the myth of Bacchus is mobile, availa-
ble, far richer than its congealed historicity would grant it. As Gilbert
Lascault has written, for Raysse there is ‘no twilight of the gods’ and,
of course, the symbol of wine and bread Raysse has explored contains
within it the seeds of celebrations far beyond the Christian, a hybrid
revelling in the hybrid itself, in the innocent joyousness and true, deep
wondrousness of matter, of body, of mind, of spirit. Works such as Le
Salut soit sur la Dame si sage (1998) or Ainsi voici du coeur l’étrange
parure (1999), the 2006 distemper and graphite Étude turque or the Re
mon cher maître, the latter two with their grinning glance once more
to Ingres, or, again, the largish 2008 bronze statue, D’une flèche mon
coeur percé, with its mirrors and white gold leaf, or the 2009 mixed
media painting-cum-sculpture La Surface des eaux – all, in their dif-
ferent ways, ‘reach out, as Raysse has written, to what previously was
called poetry, ie a moment one feels one is truly living’. Living, that
is, at once sensually and spiritually (: ever in the widest sense attribut-
able to this term), conscious too of the sheer materiality of one’s ges-
ture, its ever rearing remakeableness, the ever available conceptual
and symbolic jouissance of its poiein. If this is said of his work on that
delightful, luxuriating, pro-foundly celebratory cinema Raysse has
given us, it might just as easily be said of, say, the paintings of La Pe-
tite Maison or his post-Poussin and post-Leonardo ‘bacchanalia’ –
Raysse’s appropriation of the Bacchus loosely attributed to Leonardo
da Vinci is particularly well adapted to his own mongrel, supple and
serious-cum-ludic ontology in that the sixteenth-century original was
first titled John the Baptist before, much later, being overpainted as a
Bacchus.11 ‘Showing what I love’, Raysse has equally written to de-
scribe the purpose of his plastic gesture. And, indeed, it is no small
thing to paint with such an intention; in fact, I should go so far as to
say that it is a very great thing, and relatively rare, for, though not sa-
11
The title of Raysse’s work is Le Bacchus de Sainte Terre. It is a portrayal, indeed a
self-portrait, one feels, that Raysse gleefully recycles in various paintings, such as the
1996 Proverbes 9-2, as well as the very recent Heureux rivages.
botaging critical sociopolitical vision and thought, it leaps through the

latter to a mode of being and functioning beyond, where, in the very
midst of existential contrast art may conjure up, not mere acquies-
cence, passive tolerance, but a smile of blessing, an accord of joy.
Heureux rivages and other recent paintings such as the 2007 Poissons
d’avril or the 2008 Oui chéri beam forth the energy of such a smiling
and vigorous assent to such at once feasible and dreamed blissfulness
– despite any yet imaginable trailing pique or strickenness life may
engender. The 300 x 400 cm Heureux rivages reveals an art and an
existence bathed in the privacy of consciousness and the free exhilara-
tion of free togetherness. Oui chéri offers the mirror of love’s old and
sweetly strange toying, the never fathomable gaze of the other, of
otherness, that art’s ‘vision’, ever newly ‘hygienic’, ever tracks and
meditates. In ease and puzzlement simultaneously. That art can opt for
a practice and an interrogation of the quirky tricks both life and art
itself ceaselessly discover and deploy may be said to reside at the cen-
tre of Martial Raysse’s large acrylic Poissons d’avril: art and life in a
dance of mutual ludic but consenting-querying amorous embrace.
THE ENDLESS IMPRINTING OF BEING:
CHRISTIAN JACCARD
It may seem, when we look at the early work of Christian Jac-

card, his Empreintes polychromes d’adhésifs (1969-70), for example,
or the 1972 Toile paquetée, empreintes de ficelage, that we are at an
untraversable distance from Piero della Francesca’s Virgin and Child
enthroned with four Angels, from Rubens’ Jardin d’amour, even Niki
de Saint Phalle’s Jardin du Tarot or Gérard Titus-Carmel’s Pocket
size Tlingit Coffin. Surely, we may feel and argue, some mere imprints
of bits of string, even if carefully woven and knotted, or, yet more im-
probably, pieces of tape, surely such seeming minima cannot be con-
ceived of in some continuity and affinity with works of visible human
presence and relationship, or others representing some extensive creat-
ive effort, albeit quirkily elusive, strange, fanciful and defiant of our
impulse to rationally categorise. As I shall seek to show, however, it is
from such beginnings, visceral, fundamental, authentic, largely self-
doubting, that the powerful and original oeuvre we know today, the
ever radically ontologically exploratory gestures that constitute it,
have slowly but surely emerged – albeit in the midst of the curious
jouissance of their anxiety.
Jaccard’s is an oeuvre of intimately fused repetition and re-

newal, obsession and discovery.1 It becomes, we may think, fetishistic
in its teemingly proliferative démarche and production. Its imprints,
trace markings, knottings and burnings are caught up in a seemingly
implacable movement of making, unmaking and quasi-Pongian re-
making. Resurrection vies with, reveals itself in a sense as synonym-
ous with, death, destruction. If Jaccard’s art is one of process, a tinker-
ing process of bricolage, instinctive, inquisitive, a doing-in-order-to-
see, without determinable eschatology, the process may be said to
draw its power from a doing that equates to the self’s very being. Not
that Jaccard’s art is narcissistic, but it remains ever at that neurotic,
energetic centre of the self’s engagement with the very strange and
1
See Selected Bibliography. No personal website exists, but much is viewable online.
remarkable core of what is, in principle anything that is, its emer-
gence, its remanence, its transmutative disappearance.
In as long ago as 1958 Jaccard makes his very first empreintes

of plants and animal life, his first exhibition coming four years later.
From 1964 to 1976 he works in an art print establishment, during
which time he will both, instinctually, unconsciously even, lay the
groundwork for everything that will come, and produce a vast number
of imprints and knot-works that will not be revealed to the public be-
fore 1973, with an exhibition of knots in London, then Sao Paolo, fol-
lowed by a 1976 exhibition of empreintes involving insects, plants,
small animals, paper, ribbons, cloths, strings, knot-‘tools’ and so on –
even burned, buried, fermented and resurrected shroud canvases. The
empreinte, in effect, will remain the essential artistic mode of explora-
tion of the world for Christian Jaccard, right down to the fire works
still pursuing today their relentless fascinations and probings. The im-
print is, of course, a trace, an archiving, of the earth’s contents and its
own, inherent processes of self-elaboration. It speaks of barely con-
ceivable equations of being and seeming flirtations with non-being, an
exchange of matter and energy leading us to think through the fragile
terminology of creation and destruction. The empreinte is the ‘dead’,
but still extant face of beingness. A silent mystery play whose surface
features speak wordlessly of the deep unsaidness of our earthly ontici-
ty. A persisting presence offering to our minds the joined agendas of
loss and fullness – a kind of ‘presentification’, as Claude Simon might
have said, of absence, residue, trans-figuration: a shifting of the im-
ages of being – and a vicarious living of the processes of such shifting
trans-figuration, a living, as Achille Benito Oliva has written, of the
image’s, the trace image’s, ‘capacity for ideation’. Thus is it that earli-
er works such as the 1971 Toile jaune décolorée (with its fused offer-
ing of imprinted canvas and the knot-‘tool’ with which imprinting
comes about), or the 1973 Couple toile/outil échelle (acrylic, ink,
hemp, canvas, 280 x 95 cm), or yet again the 1973 even larger, exqui-
site blue and white-flecked vertical canvas Toile calcinée, with its
burned white wick horizontal markings or ‘imprints’ – all such works
entail a ritualistic exploration of what we may think of as the primor-
diality of matter, the latter’s inner, perhaps unconscious, self-
elaboration, sensed in turn, via the artist’s own swirling, barely articu-
latable consciousness, to carry and display deep, ancient, residual
The Endless Imprinting of Being: Christian Jaccard 113
forces of all beingness. A theatre of ephemerality and evolution stages

itself in these varying modes of the empreinte – of being’s imprints,
ever shifting, infinitely renewed in their micro-specificities where
time and space, ‘indissociable’ Berthet argues, play out through the
neurosis of Jaccard himself. The empreinte marks out – via an art of
‘painting’ that, Jaccard himself maintains, escapes from the history of
painting, refounding not just its modes perhaps, but, too, its agendas,
its purposes – the primacy, and primalness, of physical gesture, the
geste – the song, the dance, the poetry – of physicality. But it is a
marking that masks its subtext, the ‘logic’, any ‘logic’, we may pre-
sume to feel or argue underpins and authorises it. This, precisely, is
the ‘capacity for ideation’, for mythification, contemplation, theorisa-
tion, that Oliva, along with Jaccard himself, feels the empreinte can
generate – whether of insect or string or fire, anything, in fact, impli-
citly. The empreinte thus lays before us the vestigial product of the
strange equations of time and space, a palimpsest-like product of an-
cient processes of being and doing enacted here and now, as ever for
our pleasure, our wonderment, our perhaps anxious awe.
From the outset, knotting has accompanied Jaccard’s imprint-

ing activities, a first exhibition coming in 1962, and, from the stand-
point of its relation to painting, the artist is acutely aware that the ‘log-
ic’ of canvas and that of the fibres of string and rope remain intimately
fused – differently enacted, but inseparable, and this not only in the
use of knots as painting and imprinting tools or the simultaneous dep-
loyment of knot-imprints and the knot-tools used on canvas itself. Jac-
card’s 365 outils he speaks of as representing ‘365 days of anxiety-
oppression, delight-affirmation’, and, in 1979, some six years follow-
ing the London-Sao Paolo exhibitions, he gives us, at the Galerie
d’Art Contemporain de Montpellier, no less than 729 knot-tools in 9
series of 81 graphited hemp ropelets – a mathematics whose implicit
diverse symbolics Jaccard explains, fascinated, to Bernard Noël. Ele-
ments of such a massive and subsequently continued ‘collection’ – for
Jaccard does not have the initial aim of composing a structure, but
finds himself engaged in gathering and preserving the strange, impul-
sively produced products of his pseudo-neurotic process of doing,
‘passing time’, as Beckett would say – can be seen, however, not in
any way to slavishly adhere to such mathematics: Suite de 4 outils
noués (1971-72), with its jute and soaked sisal, Couple toile-outils
(1974), a large diptych of inked linen and impregnated hemp (210 x

123 cm + 192 x 120 cm), or the 1983-86 Suite de 25 objets couronnés,
with its use of iron stem, wood, hemp, sisal, rubber, jute, polypropy-
lene and graphite – works such as these show, over a long period of
years, the ever mutating nature of knotting’s fabrication and deploy-
ment, its ‘applications’ and its modes of gathering. Jaccard’s knots can
stand alone or in groups; they may proliferate within their individual
forms, ‘suddenly’ sprouting ‘crowns’ via some visceral desire to effect
efflorescence, a kind of visible rhizomaticity; they may be grafted one
onto the other, or may soar on âmes, their iron ‘souls’ – what a lovely
notion! – that allow even further self-adventure and ascensional self-
expansion; they will always be – despite Jaccard’s initial ‘shame’ over
them – plunged into resin or graphite to render them rigid, and pre-
serve them; and such preservation may take the (extreme) form of
placing them in boxes, coffins, ‘precious jewels’, yes, as Noël called
them, but dead dolls too, speaking of Jaccard’s hauntedness, his ever
present meditation on time and mortality.
We may, of course, be tempted to see in such activity a form

of modern arte povera, as well as the kind of ‘primitivism’ Alfred
Pacquement discerns in a gesture of considerable ancientness, one,
however, whose practicality has disappeared, mutating into that non-
utilitarianism spinning about on its axis which obsessiveness tends to
imply – but which is, no doubt, at the centre of all artistic gesture
searching for, and perhaps finding, within itself, purpose, value, a
‘use’ needing radical ontological rethinking. Furthermore, Jaccard’s
knotting, products of a ‘nomadic hand’, as Oliva writes, a hand ever
shifting in its tensionality of repetitivity and never-sameness – such
knot-works, whilst seemingly ascetic, the austere exercising of the
hermitic, as the Greeks saw things, yet betray this bare minimality
both in their massive pluralness and in the kind of ‘violence’ Michaud
and Noël both remark upon in the laborious and physically demanding
production of what is finally offered in its delicate stillness. What
meaning, if any, can we then ascribe to the hundreds and hundreds of
knottings Jaccard finally agrees to give us, after thinking long and
hard as to whether he, in fact, should do so? Knot-works are not
signed, or, better, we may deem them to be self-signing, somewhat
like Claude Viallat’s painted canvases whose (a)signature lies in a
form ‘evacuating’ authorialship yet offering identity and signings ar-
guably beyond signification. Thus may we hold such works to be si-

mulacra, images parodying semblances, signs without a face, pointing
nowhere – merely and manicly to themselves. Works as non-sense,
though underpinned by whatever meaning and value we may give to
insistence, blind, uncertain continuity, a doing plunged into the deep
night of itself – and self’s beingness.
The ritualistic dimension of Jaccard’s knot-works it is impor-

tant to think through.2 Doing of this order cannot, though no definitive
name may be put on it, be deemed nihilist, wanton, (self)-destructive –
notions occasionally surfacing when speaking of either Jaccard’s knot-
works or his art of fire to which we shall soon give our attention. All
doing, as Jaccard himself senses in regard of his own gestures, wheth-
er imprints of insects or knotting or burnings, along with their respec-
tive imprintings, may be held to be a ‘religious’ phenomenon: reve-
rence for and honouring of what is, however ‘minimal’; a ‘binding
together’ (religare) of scraps of an existence, via doing; a faithfulness
to being’s strangeness, as well as to the capacity of self to sing the lyr-
ical song (however lowly, ‘poorly’) of self and all that is other (: in-
sects, rope, etc., etc.). And all of this, as Jaccard tells us, via some
blind but instinctively obstinate day by day ‘conviction’ of its perti-
nence, its deep vital connectedness to an improbable divinity of self
and world that their coming together in this way strangely seals. So
that, if we are inclined to see works such as the 1976-79 Objet greffé
et suite de 9 outils or the 1984-85 Objet couronné, with its characteris-
tic constituents of iron, wood, hemp, jute and graphite, and, of course,
any empreinte made via knotted works become ‘tools’, as abstractions
due to their seeming self-reflexive non-representational quality, we
yet must bear in mind that, though beyond ‘anecdotalness’ and ‘all
figuration’, as Noël and Pacquement respectively have argued, such
works may be said to ‘represent’ in two other critical ways:
1: they speak of matter’s primacy, they depict, chronicle and

stand as icons of matter’s pure and caressable materiality
beyond our capacity to fathom and characterise its ‘logic’;
2
There are interesting passages in Mircea Eliade’s writing on knots, and Salah
Stétié’s entire work thinks through the logic of knottedness.
2: they speak too, and, once again, figure, picture and recount,
without explanation, sensing the latter’s radical unfeasible-
ness, the doing, the faire, the poiein available to the person
prepared to assume them, become an artist – and, via this
doing, render tangible the artist’s being, his or her being-in-
the-world, present to the world’s matter – its stunning mate-
rialness and its profound matteringness, if I may put it that
way.3 Thus do works, such as Objet couronné or Couple toile-
outils lay before us a double image, silently eloquent, discreet-
ly lyrical, but never neutral, detached, remote, of an ontology
of an uncertain self engaged dynamically with its equally un-
certain others. Jaccard’s desire to move beyond painting’s felt
‘incapacity’, to experience some ‘flash and magicalness’, as
he tells us in 1990 – a flash and magicalness no doubt most
fully lived in his working with fire – already reveals and
represents itself, I should maintain, in the late 1950’s and ear-
ly 1960’s with the empreintes and noeuds that soon will proli-
ferate. Anthropology and materiology fuse via an ontological
search that the pursuit, the study and the meditation of fire
will only deepen and complexify, but the die is already cast
and, as with Mallarmé, its resultant mathematics will defy
neat and stable, reposeful equations.
The logic, if we may call it that, underpinning the fire and

burning that lie at the centre of Christian Jaccard’s work from the ear-
ly 1970’s on, is, perhaps inevitably, in significant part a logic of lan-
guage and emotion, philosophy and psychology, theory and visceral
instinct. And, of course, it remains intimately interwoven with the log-
ics already expounded of the empreinte and the noeud, in themselves
hovering about that hyperhybrid space of the strictly physical and the
mythical, the materio-metaphysical and the affective. If the applica-
tion and use of fire would seem to go back into the deep recesses of
human history, where we can presume at once its practical exploita-
tion – heating, illumination, protection, desired modification of ele-
ments of the immediate world – and its relative sanctification, the ritu-
3
Reverdy’s insistence on art’s necessary refusal of ‘anecdotality’ can thus be seen to
be ‘subverted’ in the ‘neo-representational’ manners I describe and which Jaccard’s
art in particular bring to the fore.
alistic exploitation of its revered mysterious and mystical power, it is

to philosophers such as Heraclitus or the Chinese concept of Wu Xing
that we owe the binary yet synthesised logic of destruction and trans-
mutation, annihilation and energetic exchange that still today informs
our broad conceptualisation of fire as a primordial ‘element’ and an
agent of fused impermanence and strange continuity. Jaccard’s prac-
tice of the art of fire is, in effect, far from flatly and banally aesthetic,
and his writings and interviews demonstrate a deep meditation of the
yet nearly inscrutable implications of fire, its myths, its magicalness,
its terror and its sobering exhilarations. He is, of course, alert to the
work of other sometime artists of fire: Yves Klein, for example, who,
in 1957, applied firecrackers to canvas at the opening of an exhibition
of his work, and who, in the last years of his brief life, burned pig-
ments onto paper (Colour fire Fc3) and set fire to water-sprinkled pa-
per (Fire F271), fascinated as he, too, was with the enigmas of void
and purification esoterically implicit at the heart of seeming degrada-
tion and erasure. And there was Alberto Burri, who, during this same
period, could tear up his work, burn it and reconstitute it via collaging,
or else give us his 1958 Combustione plastica or his 1964 works such
as Grande rosso P18 or Rosso plastica, where molten and burnt plas-
tics revealed, arguably, something of their material instrinsicalness at
the same time as they inevitably evoked the ‘cleansing fires’ pouring
down on a wartime Milan Burri memorialised in other dramatic artis-
tic manners. Whilst other artists Jaccard recognises as having varying
degrees of influence on his own démarche – from Duchamp with his
radical and off-handed (self-)liberations and Dubuffet with his syste-
matic refusal of art’s cultural conditioning, to Piero Manzoni with his
Achrone works of the late 1950’s, Rauschenberg and his neo-Dada
Combines, and, of course, so-called primitive and anonymous art in
general – the philosophical and even the psychological roots of Jac-
card’s sense of fire may be said to lie in the Heraclitean equations of
ongoing change via destruction and creation, elegant equations of rela-
tionality and circular exchange as conceived via Wu Xing, though
more theatrically dramatised by Bachelard, in his Psychanalyse du
feu, as the tensional struggle between the paradisiacal and the infernal,
the luminous and the tormenting. Alain Duault, in his text for the 2009
Livres et leporelli, speaks of the many faces of what Oliva calls Jac-
card’s ‘glorious fire’, and there is little doubt that the artist’s fascina-
tion has grown and multiplied exponentially since his very early burn-
ing, burying and final exhumation of material and his later visit to Ca-
serte, Naples, where he gazed into the incandescent abyss of the vol-
canic magma.
But let us look more closely at some examples of Jaccard’s

plastic adventures in the art of fire. In 1973 he offers various Toiles
calcinées, of different dimensions: the considerable and beautiful blue
and white-flecked vertical canvas (390 x 101 cm) with its burned
white wick horizontal markings giving an effect as delicate as Monet’s
water lilies, a piece Suzanne Pagé describes as ‘involv[ing] great con-
trol and the aleatory, mastery and pure empiricism, mortiferous de-
struction and epiphanic revelation of unforeseen chromatic and ma-
terial splendours’;4 or the piece of lesser but still significant dimen-
sions (173 x 119 cm), with its trace or empreinte, residual imprint, of
the disappeared white wick object upon a red acrylic canvas – a drama
as aesthetic as it is ontic, ontological.5 The 1975 Toile brûlée, em-
preinte polychrome clearly emphasises Jaccard’s understanding of
fire’s residualness as a process and state of imprinting whereby disco-
loration provides new spontaneous aesthetic effects at the same time
as the at times completely burnt-through canvas in the vertical axis
and the tattered remnants and loose bits of acrylic powerfully ‘narrate’
the equations of deterioration, ‘nothingness’ and transmutation we
have mentioned above. The Trophées or Cuirs calcinés of the late
1970’s pursue such at once material and meditative explorations. One
thinks of the 1977 Grand Trophée (282 x 240 cm) with its white wick
burnt hide offering an intensification of our livable sense of destruc-
tion by fire, a radicalisation of the experience of animal (and human)
sacrifice, exploitation even, this, naturally, in tense ‘harmony’ with
the purely aesthetic dimension of the work’s plasticity. Similar un-
stated agendas of irony, contrast, anxiety-pleasure are articulated in
the stark realism of Jaccard’s 1978 Grand Trophée du scorpion,
another dramatically and, naturally, impressively large incinerated
4
The question of the aleatory is, of course, complex, and in the ‘poetics’ of Jaccard
may be said to be deconstructed inasmuch as burning matter may be said ever to un-
fold, rather, the intrinsic, unrandom, though unforeseeable ‘logic’ of matter-in-certain-
conditions.
5
I use the term ‘ontic’ to evoke the raw, intrinsic phenomenon of beingness, whereas
‘ontological’ may be said to refer to all discourse that may be directed towards the
unnameableness of beingness, ontos, fundamental ‘onticity’.
hide (255 x 255 cm). With reference to another 1978 piece, Assem-
blage Nabuc – but it is a commentary pertinent to all of these works
involving burned skin – Gérard-Georges Lemaire speaks of a ‘projec-
tion into the sphere of fetishism and unutterable outrage’ of fragments
of hide/skin – with all of the discourse attachable to them, though left
for the viewer to generate according to his or her private ethics or spi-
ritual ontology.
The 1980’s see many further developments whereby fire con-

tinues to be used simultaneously as a tool and the subject of art con-
ceived of as permitting a contemplation of both the physical surface
and the symbolic mystery of incarnatedness. Take the various Papiers
calcinés and Combustions sur papier that are experimented in the
1980-84 period, for example. What we see are works of varying size
(from, say, 137 x 120 cm to works as small as 50 x 65 cm), all deploy-
ing white wicks in endlessly new patterns and in combination with the
use of a wide range of other materials such as pencil, talc, pastel, gra-
phite, chalk, offering a panoply of effect to tease the mind and the
senses, aesthetically, viscerally and ‘metaphysically’. Lemaire does
not see such work – quite rightly, to my mind – as some ‘pure nega-
tion of the artistic gesture’, nor as some sort of ‘metaphorical holo-
caust’. But, if there remains here a chromatic fascination via the use of
multiply selected or treated papers – waxed, greasy, dull, dark, white,
thick, standard –, ever present, indeed indelible, beyond the relative
innocence of burning paper, are yet the fused preoccupations of fire’s
induced angst and trauma, and the curious, irresistible sense of a cos-
mic and mystical alchemy endlessly enactable. The 1982 Papiers ci-
ble, with their black or white wick burnings on white paper, thus offer
stunning plastic formations, sensuous, rich, aesthetically pleasurable,
but, too, they provide a site for the staging and spontaneous revelation
of the hidden mathematics of being, the secret structures of its enig-
matic alterity. And Bernard Ceysson goes so far, writing of the Grand
Papier d’Arches X (1988), as still to see in such fire-on-paper works a
firm echo of the Trophées, an echo of the tensions not just of order
and seeming disorder, but of beauty and horror, simplicity and pro-
found disturbance. These years show Jaccard engaged in a number of
other plastic adventures not perhaps so much ambiguous as diverse
and interwoven in their philosophical, aesthetic and psychological mo-
tivations and underpinnings. Take, this time, the 1980 Anonyme cal-
ciné, one amongst others involving the burning of white wicks on un-
attributed oil paintings: art now becomes the obliteration of art – but at
the same time its conservation as trace of its seeming iconoclastic ob-
literation. Shall we privilege, then, some principle of absolute iconoc-
lasm when an archived trace of the original remains? Can we be sens-
ibly even tempted to think that there is some elitist destruction of (a
certain) art’s ordinariness, mediocrity, ‘forgettableness’, when, in ef-
fect, Jaccard’s oeuvre as a whole reveals hesitation as to its own initial
and even ongoing value – as well as, here, a hesitation over his own
iconoclasm, in keeping open a tiny window onto the destroyed. Is
there, then, irony, self-mutilation, in Jacccard’s unspoken plastico-
ontological equation, or is this a fleeting gesture against all representa-
tion of the beingness of self and other – an illumination of the anony-
mousness, the unnameableness of all beingness? In fact, Jaccard will
even turn topsy-turvy our belief in some wild and aggressive iconoc-
lasm, arguing in 1991 that the anonymous, of art (and being, no
doubt), is drawn into the light, from the dark void, by, rather, a cares-
sive gesture of ‘iconolatry’ far beyond any idea of sacrilege, profana-
tion. And, lest we may attribute some angry destructive sentiment to
the various 1982 white or black wick firings of postcards of Dela-
croix’s Femmes d’Alger or Goya’s La Maja desnuda, or the 1980 in-
cendiary action applied to assembled postcards of Bacchus et la
Nymphe au bord de la fontaine, let us heed the only apparent paradox
of Jaccard’s statement made to Dominique Berthet in a 1998 inter-
view: ‘Any work of fire is first of all consciousness of fire and desire
for fire, in other words desire for love’.
This understood, Jaccard’s many commentators resist only

with difficulty the idea of what Daniel Abadie, with reference to the
dramatically potent Pièces blanches brûlées of the 1982-84 period,
terms Jaccard’s ‘iconoclastic mania’. In effect, fire cremates, drastical-
ly reduces, stirs our anxieties over a lurking conceivable nothingness
at the centre of being; yet it does this at the same time as its light exhi-
larates, reveals a dazzling alterity, points to the mystery of transmuta-
tion, and, of course, allows entry into the ever unforeseeable, seeming-
ly capricious realm of new plastic intrigue. The Pièces blanches
brûlées can attain to vast proportions (390 x 590 cm). Their white
wick burnings upon raw, unprocessed canvas offer a neo-painting of
incinerated, scarred landscape, a neo-landscape the earth endlessly
deploys but which art now reveals for the first time. These pieces are
true fire paintings, their forms half-orchestrated, half-dreamt, their ac-
tuality laid bare before us via a blazing pandemonium only witnessed
by Jaccard himself. Great swathes of brandings, fiery gougings and
lesions blacken canvases sometimes treated with acrylic paint that rip-
ples, furrows, streams about certain half-calculations (circles, crosses,
etc.) ever overtaken by that intrinsic and secret mathematics also on
display, remarkably illuminated in relatively smaller works of the
Papier cible series.
The Rouge émis (1985-86) works, like the six Burnt Cut Ups
(1986), whilst manifesting these same latter tensions of plastic design
and astonished submission to the inherent art of matter’s spontaneous
generations and transfigurations, unfold upon a paper or canvas back-
cloth of striking reds. The effects are varied in the formal contrivance
of the Burnt Cut Ups and entail the use of black wicks, adhesive tape,
acrylic paint on different papers (vélin, Rives, Arches, Japon, Bristol,
Gaufré) of different shapes and sizes (largely modest, but never minia-
ture: 65 x 50 cm, 76 x 60 cm, 83 x 73 cm, etc.). The Rouge émis
works are distinctly bigger (195 x 130 cm, 200 x 200 cm, for exam-
ple), and can range from the exquisite black smokiness of white wick
burning on rectangular acrylic canvas, to sharper geometric black and
white wick scarrings on a circular red acrylic canvas. Such creations
mutate in the 1986-88 period into the works such as the huge Tondo
Rouge émis, combustion (382 x 405 cm), where, once more, one feels
that Jaccard’s fire painting has found a delicate balance, via an as-
sumption of radically new aesthetic means, between beauty and dis-
quiet, sublimeness and awed trepidation, inventive concertation and
assent to the explosive, seemingly anarchic inherency of the earth’s
elements in interaction. Wonderful 1988 works such as the Mandorle
rouge buissonnoeud, combustion show Christian Jaccard pushing ever
further his penetration into the dazzling and yet formidable realm of
fire art: great smoky black clouds billow up on large red acrylic man-
dorla-shaped canvases (284 x 206 cm, or 174 x 127 cm) set abaze via
black wicks, the language employed by Jaccard to describe them re-
vealing at once his sense of the mystical or at least symbolic overlap-
ping of the human and the divine in enclosing almond-like form
(mandorla) and the necessity of resorting to neologisms (buisson-
noeud: bushknot) to evoke the indescribable, the unnameable – a burn-
ing bushknot that hints at Jaccard’s consciousness of the sacred forces

of being ever gathering, ever self-releasing. The fire painting most
spectularly haunting and evocative of the ineffable, is the 1988 Rouge
orangé buissonnoeud, craquelé, combustion, a large (200 x 170 cm)
black wick and (orange) acrylic on canvas, filled with a stunning trace
image – a revelation and a mask (imago) – of cosmic energies freely
at play, yet accompanied by the artist, in all the sumptuous splendour,
all their awesome soberingness.
From the late 1980’s on Christian Jaccard’s work adds another

string to a bow we may have thought already fully assembled: the
concept supranodal. Made of an iron frame covered in ribbons of
curled and balled cotton hardened by an ever startling red acrylic coat-
ing, Portique haut, concept supranodal (1988) returns Jaccard to the
realm of a newly conceived type of knotting, this time constituting a
more manifestly sculptural form (: the earlier knotworks may, of
course, attain to sculptured form, but are largely miniaturised until the
âme, the inner supportive frame, is adopted). Portique haut (233 x 180
x 55 cm) offers the quirkiest and most gangly of porticos and bears
resemblance to a skinny, almost bodiless and certainly headless ani-
mal with two legs seemingly padding along in pseudo-motion. If Gia-
cometti and even Niki de Saint Phalle come to mind, Portique haut
clearly stakes out its own aesthetic and modal territory. Portique bas,
concept supranodal (1988) confirms this double radical break, as Jac-
card himself sees it, with ‘sculpture’s evolution’: the supranodal con-
cept, he tells us in 1998, ‘invents, through excrescence and arbores-
cence, a rebirth of utopian forms that art only knows how to bring
about’. Portique bas is a large (250 x 60 cm) single bobbly red acrylic
supranodal tower balancing on one balled foot, its top attached to the
ceiling, and accompanied by an immediately adjacent supranodal
pseudo-football – any portico effect being achieved solely by the
space created between the column and the wall. Utopian art, yes; for
the work’s non-utilitarian aspect, its phantasmagoricalness (which is
not simply play, but exploration), its ironic and perhaps smiling pseu-
do-figurativeness – all invites disbelief in art’s mimesis and, rather, a
revelling in a pleasurableness that the art of fire tends to offer, as we
have seen, only with constraint, a degree of fretfulness and anxiety.
These red lacquered works – further early pieces include Cylindre,
concept supranodal (1987-88) and various Cadres (1990) – Jaccard
insistently sees both as corresponding with research in quantum phys-

ics and molecular biology, and as escaping the trap of seeing art,
though it may be said to engage with truth and existence’s enigmas, as
a gesture offering encodable answers in the face, precisely, of being’s
slipperiness and ineffableness. Joppolo suggests that the power of the
supranodal lies in its departure from what we may view as the ‘quoti-
dian’ – a cylinder, a picture frame –, and its leap into the realm of the
‘biomorphic’, reality’s at once chemical and alchemical ‘alternative-
ness’.
Art, then – we may think of other supranodal creations, either

with red acrylic coating such as the large and wonderful half-tree,
half-animal Concept supranodal of 1989 (225 cm high, 310 cm wide),
with its flailing arms/branches, or the white acrylic ensemble of 1991-
93, White camera, concept supranodal, where bed, table, desk and
picture frame inhabit in eerie and ghostly and entirely non-functional
fashion a bare sunlit room, or, again, the various Carrés BRN of 1989-
90, with their burnings upon red acrylic-coated wood – art, then, as
study, interrogation of matter’s strange becomings, its seemingly un-
ruly chaoticalness that yet hides some blinding mathematico-physical
orchestration. For Jaccard’s art, in these works, as everywhere, reveals
a fascination with the promethean, being’s capacity for trans-
figuration, conversion of its ‘images’ and masks, for matter’s (and
consciousness’) rhizomaticity, its secret branchings, multiplications,
its exchangings. His art, whether it involve empreinte or knotwork,
burning or supranodal concept, never ceases to tackle questions of be-
ing and doing, via that ‘conviction’ we have heard him speak of,
which is patience, persistence, a blind trust in being’s fearful asto-
nishments, the sense that, as he tells us, contemporary art (and life, no
doubt) may be in crisis, but it is a ‘crisis which is essentially positive’,
for the ‘destabilising’ and the ‘uncomprehended’ act as spurs,
‘sow[ing] doubt, discomfort, [but, too,] pleasure’ – the sheer, strange
pleasure of being and doing in a seeming context of loss, void, even
devastation – but a context whose other face is creation, beauty, asto-
nishment, and a fullness of alterity. Meaning and value, then, do not
come prepackaged, definitively articulated: they may emerge, if, as
Yves Bonnefoy writes, ‘we will’, and from the very maw – be it fire,
the imprinted relic of an insect, the endless gesture of knotting, etc. –
of art’s process – which becomes, thus, a process of living. Oliva
notes that Jaccard saw ‘poetry’ – a lyrical song of beingness – in gaz-

ing upon a damp stain on the wall. Such poetry, as that of the 1972
Couple toile contrepliée/outil tressé (with its delicate chromatics and
graceful geometry), of the 1980 Anonyme calciné 19e siècle (with the
naked beauty of a young woman standing amidst the fire all about), or
of the 1989 Diamant zinc BRN (showing the spontaneous ‘metapic-
torial’ [Jaccard] effect of an orchestrated burning on an oxydised zinc
support) – such poetry provides no rationally sustainable argument for
its meaning. It offers qualities and a plastic-ontic reality not readily
amenable to critical language, which as Lebahar suggests, tends to
bounce back off such reality.
The preoccupations with cosmic expansion, entropy, the ‘hid-

den realities’ of being, as Jaccard writes, that fire in particular sug-
gests to the mind, such preoccupations certainly underpin the art that
concerns us here. But it is the ‘desire to do, to make’, and the ‘exter-
nalising’ of that desire, that ultimately count, conjure meaning and
value from that which would seem to defy their conjuring. Cosmic
energy without matching human energy would just leave Jaccard, as it
might have left Mallarmé, faced with an ‘eloquent, [but] abyssal,
[desperately] declamatory whiteness of paper’, canvas, etc. It takes
‘love’, ‘iconolatry’, desire, to move from negation to affirmation,
from what is to what can be, from blockage, frustration, impotence, to
a poetic reclaiming, participation, that ‘consubstantiation’ with the
given that Reverdy deems the highest motivation and accomplishment
of all art.6 The 1983 tree-like Concept supranodal or the exquisite 9
modules zinc BRN, polyptyque (1991) (with the latter’s nine modular
burnings on granular zinc, all attached to a unifying wooden support,
on which nine golden arcs with their smoky trailings are silhouetted
against grey-blue metal) allow us to read such ‘unpainting’, as a writ-
ing of the self’s being – its ‘scripture’, we might even call it, after
Gérard-Georges Lemaire’s expression –, into the elements of cosmic
matter and energy. Primitive scenes and utopias glimpsed through
art’s prismatic transfigurings; unnameable sacredness snatched from
destruction, the ‘profaneness’ of time’s seeming deaths; the sublime
eked out from the everyday and the terrifying; eros and agapè shining
their flickering light on cosmic darkness and its implacable machi-
6
See, for example, Reverdy’s En vrac (Monaco, 1956).
nery. Certainly, Jaccard’s 1972 Suite de 22 outils et entrelacs, his

1980-81 series of Combustions sur papier, his Mobilier VIII, concept
supranodal, are anticanonical, transgressive; certainly we may agree
with him that ‘my conception of painting is one of deconstruction’;
certainly Joppolo is not at all wrong to argue that Jaccard’s oeuvre
globally reveals a ‘fundamental search for pure forms and signs’, a
‘shortcircuiting of representation’, as Bernard Ceysson argues. But
this agenda that moves from what we may think of as the anecdotal to
some articulation of the universal, cannot be thought as a primarily
aesthetic agenda, though art’s poiein, its tireless making and remak-
ing, dominate the space of exhibition. The flow of primordial ener-
gies, within the self and within the phenomena of the world, the inves-
tigation, the scrutiny, the experience and the meditation of such ener-
gies in the production of what Mallarmé termed ‘some third aspect
fusible and bright’, a third, intermediary energy, this, I should main-
tain is what, at bottom, drives Jaccard’s gesture. If, then, this interme-
diary energy is art itself, it remains that it is not deployed and explored
for its narcissistic prestige: far from evacuating the world to establish
some transcendent art for art’s sake, art’s gesture is ontological, con-
cerned with the logic, the logos, of the matter-energy of being, its si-
multaneously frighteningly banal, even ‘disastrous’, yet divine, sacred
depths, unfathomable though experiencable. The ash, the bituminous
trace juices, the decomposition provoked by fire, these are never ends,
finalities; rather are they the processes at the heart of all beingness’
inner exchange. Jaccard’s agenda is thus vast, implicitly infinite,
beyond words, beyond rationally solvable equations, and it moves and
flows at that intersection of forces seemingly unreconcilable yet ever
reconciled by the mystery of being itself.
Christian Jaccard’s work, of the late 1990’s through to 2010,

continues to pursue this intrinsically complex and rich agenda, offer-
ing both major retrospectives such as the 1998 Empreintes, Dessins et
Objets in Osaka, covering the entire span of his production since
1972, or the 2002 exhibition at the Musée des Beaux-Arts, La Chaux
de Fonds, En noir et blanc, an exhibition centred on very recent crea-
tivity and preoccupations from 1993-2000. Much new exploration
continues, however, and there are various important writings which
are currently being collated so as to appear by 2011. There is the most
interesting 2002 exhibition in Roubaix, Confrontation, where Jac-
card’s work is ‘read’ in relation to a painting by the Dutch artist,

George Hendrik Breitner, Moonlight/Clair de lune, a ‘confrontation’ –
of separate but affinitary human energies, energies too of conscious-
ness of time – that will be highlighted at the Musée d’Orsay in 2008
when the exhibition is taken up again with Jaccard’s large (204 x 279
cm x 2) and very beautiful ‘confrontational’–complementary diptych
titled Minuit – Minuit écart, with its use of thermal combustion gel on
the support offering the most subtle and fluidly imbricated greys and
whites and blacks of being’s emerged intrinsicalness. As a White
Dream is the name Jaccard confers on an impressive supranodal con-
cept ensemble exhibited in 2003 at Marseille’s Chapelle de la Vieille
Charité. ‘Dream, the artist tells us, is a binding theme of my work. I
have had forever a recurring dream: I am in a vast abyss of white
clouds feeling oppressed’. The ensemble of hauntingly white acrylic-
treated knot-ribboned antisculptures – Jaccard argues that sculpture
involves removal of matter, whereas the supranodal structures add,
multiply, proliferate, and are ‘objects’, simply – reveals bed, chair,
tree, birdcage on pedestal, walking stick, wheelbarrow, garden imple-
ments, etc., creations that speak of ‘my turpitudes, my phantasms, my
dreams’ with all their domestic banality, fused with bizarre white su-
pranodal transfiguration of the quotidian. Their logic retreats into their
very beingness, their madeness: quite simply, as Bernard Muntaner
writes, ‘THEY ARE’. They are, in and via the ‘energies’ that have
made them the world’s, Jaccard’s own, and that now inhabit them –
‘meta-physically’, one might say, echoing Gilbert Lascault’s observa-
tion, for such energies are characterised essentially by what Jaccard
terms an ‘inner flux’ art can only capture in stilled, congealed symbol-
ic manner. Les Dormeurs (2003) also rings certain changes, taking
four photographs whose filmed burning constitutes a live ‘scenario’
speaking of the inherency of energy’s unforeseeable but programma-
ble ‘performance’. ‘Whatever it is, Jaccard tells us in an interview for
Arts Thèmes, the thing looked at forever changes our view of the
world.’ But it is a view that, in Christian Jaccard’s case, whilst pro-
ducing and being mediated by images, ever remains a moving site of
meditation, deep contemplative reflection upon the seen and the un-
seen, events and their traces, yes, but endlessly subjected to an onto-
logical surmising that, like all didascalic musing, becomes an integral
part of the radiant space of the plastic work proper.7 The four photo-
graphs of Les Dormeurs thus find themselves fatally – wonderfully,
richly, as proliferatively as Jaccard’s supranodal concept creations –
immersed in the fullness, the entirety of the artist’s teeming comments
and exchanges devoted to his own plastic processes and productions.
To gaze upon them is, indeed, to expose oneself to a radical shift in
one’s complete – but ever provisional – Weltanschauung. The energe-
ia the photographs of human figures being reduced to ash give off is
an ‘activity’, an ‘operation’, an ‘actualisation’ or ‘effecting’ that
plunges ever back into Jaccard’s swarming ‘logics’ of the imprint, the
knot, combustion, the supranodal, but ever forward, too, into specifici-
ties-lived-and-meditated-now. We realize this, equally, as we admire
the extraordinary 2006-2008 exhibition Christian Jaccard mounts in
the Chapelle de la Trinité in Bieuzy, the tiny village of Brittany, this
in the context of the remarkable innovative Art dans les Chapelles
programme. Proliferative, hieratic, serene and yet disquieting in its
implacable raising up before us of the innumerable trace images trans-
formed via their situatedness into sacred pseudo-icons of the ephe-
meral, the transfigurative, the ineffable, Jaccard’s vast poietic creation
at once invites the deepest and most sober of articulations of the forces
it releases and, at the same time, stills and silences, plunging us into
an avowal of awe, half jubilant, half affeared. For, we come to sense
better ever, here, in a place given over to contemplation of the very
mystery of incarnation and the suddenness of its disappearance, the
full power and yet the tense residual question of the significance of
raw createdness, art’s most certainly, but, forever beyond though
through art, that of our strange, wondrous and perhaps terrifying
beingness whose imprints abound and multiply and speak of an enig-
ma in the face of which only agnosis allows some fullness of know-
ing. An art ‘placing being before itself’, as Georges Bataille has writ-
ten, a gesture and its relation to our ontos that Jean-Paul Michel has
7
Derrida is most eloquent on this point when speaking of Gérard Titus-Carmel in his
Cartouches, centred on the Pocket Size Tlingit Coffin. Bonnefoy’s idea of such ra-
diance goes further, as his Le Grand Espace, translated as, precisely, The Radiant
Space (see Selected Bibliography), makes wonderfully clear.
recently further meditated8 as does Christian Jaccard here and

throughout his compelling and original oeuvre.
8
See Jean-Paul Michel’s ‘Placer l’être en face de lui-même’/‘Placing Being before
itself’ (Editions VVV, 2010).
DESIRE AND DECEPTION, THE
METONYMIES OF ARTIFICE:
JOËL KERMARREC
To look upon any selection of works by Joël Kermarrec is at

once to be stunned into admiration for the silky, seductive smoothness
of their execution, the simultaneously oneiric and, one feels, fantasti-
cally quirky provocativeness of their contents allied to their titles, and
equally, though we may be tempted to burst into multifarious response
to what we see, to be hushed and ushered irresistibly back into the
strange silences they powerfully emit. The early untitled oils on can-
vas Kermarrec: Als ik kan reproduces for us simply defy description.1
The 1969 Fond rose, a similarly fairly large (130 x 130 cm) acrylic
and oil on canvas, offers us tantalising forms – erasers? Choc-olates?,
liquid ribbons of blue – floating, free, sparse, perfectly ‘there’, pop-
artish even, we might feel, in a most subtly shaded sea of pink. A
1976-77 oil on canvas (190 x 190 cm), superbly titled Le Sourire de
l’ange et le petit trou par où on voit la mer, plunges us into a near-
erased creamy space with its faintly lingering angelic smile and a tiny
blue ‘peephole’, but, too, its rough patch and cornered oblong of
blackness, its small brushed and brilliant rainbow-like throwaway
suspended curve, a couple of other minimal markings and a miniature
of what will become Kermarrec’s trademark ampersands, tucked away
to the side, almost missable. And, taking somewhat more recent work
such as the 1984-85 Pavé d’Ostende (157.5 x 136.5 cm) or the 1996
oil on canvas, Torse, peinture charogne à la figure impossible (150 x
136 cm), we find ourselves confronted with, and hypnotically drawn
into, respectively, a large speckled white background surrounding a
thinly drawn not quite perfect red circle with its tiny gateway and in-
side it, scattered, at times their visibility ebbing, yet situated with the
sureness of one who has ‘seen’ them and ‘knows’ them, two floating,
riveting eyes, various E’s, one crossed through, a floating-fading-
sleeping face, another, bearded, ancient, gazing upon the exploded-
gathered scene, two smallish square mazes, one with its colours run-
1
See Selected Bibliography. A personal website is available:
www.joelkermarrec.com.
ning and streaming beyond the circle, a couple of handwritten and im-
possibly pallid lines, another rainbow-like, but this time excrementally
brown tuft, an apple in its faint polygon, and some tiny greyish nip-
pled shape; and, in the case of Torse, peinture charogne à la figure
impossible, our task of description nears, as Kermarrec’s title sug-
gests, the impossible: a vibrant purplish-blue background, fading to
black, contains a large white-outlined space with its indescribably
seething blackish form flecked with pink elements, a yellow streak, a
blue skeletal hand, while, outside this closed (or lassoed, captured and
featured) space, we observe a reddish-orange comet-like form crossed
out in white, another pale but luminous blue skeletal hand, a yellow-
white square, a tiny pink and a small yet green tuft, and three minute
red circles containing blobby ampersand-like forms.
It is not surprising that critical response to works such as these

is marked by wonderment and dismay, recognition of a brilliantly va-
riegated technical mastery as well as a rare capacity to convey some-
thing of a swarming and complex consciousness, and a sense of rela-
tive impotence in coming to grips, conceptually, intellectually, with
what Kermarrec’s art ceaselessly serves up. Denis Roche sees in the
teeming painted forms of this virtuoso artist ‘the luxuriant hillsides of
no-man’s-land’. Philippe Cyroulnik can insist upon that ‘brilliance of
disenchantment’ we may feel we can perceive in the exquisitely sub-
tle, even esoteric, ever shifting allusiveness of ghostly faces, eyes,
smiles, letterings, conveyed seemingly by the merest touches and
formings, now barely perceptible, now vibrantly hued. Frédéric Va-
labrègue similarly has urged us to see the ‘sumptuousness’ of Kermar-
rec’s painted ‘tinselly rags’, whilst simultaneously understanding full
well just how disconcerting and even impossibly challenging the
viewer may find them. As Yves Michaud has argued, we are faced
with an oeuvre, and each of its individual works, that ‘provokes com-
mentary but immediately deflects it’. Henri-Claude Cousseau, writing
in the catalogue to the 2007-8 exhibition Ardoises, petits papiers &...,
maintains that Kermarrec’s ‘world is secret, elliptical, sketched, elu-
sive, but peopled and agitated with signs and fragments, luminous
deepnesses, that gleamingly constellate a space whose silence is unde-
niably the bearer of a long-meditated obscurity and opaqueness’. Filter
into the equations of such broad appraisals the oddities generated by
Kermarrec’s painting and drawing on old school slates, on small open
Desire and Deception, the Metonymies of Artifice: Joël Kermarrec 131
paintboxes, his multimedia use of collaging, photo transfer, the end-

less cycling in and recycling of what Derrida would term remainders,
leftovers, chutes and déchets, the incorporation of ‘accidents of the
day’ – a dead fly, a feather – ‘gadgets’, ‘instruments of transition’
(ladders, pointers, etc.) that are and are not part of a given painting
‘against’ which they are placed – when such elements are factored into
an appreciation of an art at once aesthetically rebellious and wittily yet
seriously existentially self-searching, no wonder a critic such as Yves
Michaud can speak of a disturbing, slippery enigmaticalness, and even
an apparently ‘endless production of senselessness’ – a statement he,
as all of Kermarrec’s critics, will seek gingerly to controvert to the
extent that a profound underlying urgency is ever known to be at play
in Kermarrec’s extraordinary plastic gesture.
To speak of the latter, in effect, is not simple. Kermarrec him-

self would go further: ‘to write “on” painting, he tells us in his pub-
lished notebooks, Le Fil dans la toile, comes down to trampling on it’.
Visibleness is what art offers, he will maintain, not ‘legibleness’. The
real space of painting is flat, material, scrutinisable yet inscrutable,
while words hung upon it are ‘unspace’ – and if we may turn this
statement on its head by deeming all art, language, poetry and plastic
creation, as what Bernard Noël or Jacques Dupin or, again, Gérard
Titus-Carmel term non-lieu, ‘unspace’,2 we should understand equally
that Kermarrec is, of course, thoroughly conscious of art’s representa-
tional impotence. Both his own writings and his plastic signings he
perfectly well appreciates as not leading to knowledge in any stable
satisfactory way. As for criticism, ‘ignorance’ always risks staring it
in the face. The logic is elementary: ‘hors peint puisque dit’, he wastes
no time affirming: saying is to step outside of the painted. The two
1964 oils I recalled at the outset of the chapter are a perfect illustration
of (his) painting’s ineffableness, for any ekphrastic gesture is doomed,
no matter how earnest, to leave the realm proper of the plastic form it
purports to represent. The 1990-92 oil, Aphasie, a 110 x 110 cm
square standing on one of its corners, may seem to provide via its title
a way into its functioning and meaning, but this is a leurre, a decep-
tive trap, for its strict paintedness persists in defying such an entry,
2
See, for example, Dupin’s’ ‘Le soleil substitué’ in Dehors (Gallimard, 1975) or Ti-
tus-Carmel’s Jungle (non-lieu) (VVV Editions, 2005).
leaving us on the cusp of pure surmising. The ‘stupor’ Kermarrec may

be living and the ‘fiction’, as he also puts it, that art breeds in the face
of the real and which language can only tautologically confirm, end up
being shared by artist and viewer: the space of the painting, drawing,
sculpture, etc., although Kermarrec feels it to be crucially ‘initiatory’,
yet is one of a residual unknowing, a strangely seen and lived un-
speakableness. Just as an Yves Bonnefoy, rereading his Hier régnant
désert, may confess to its enigmaticalness, so will Kermarrec recog-
nise the unreadableness of his own work. This does not mean that
works such as the 1995-96 Mon tablier, Véronique, Mélancolie (with
its fetish of a painted stick complicating the at once dour and brilliant
canvas) or the fabulously affabulating 1985-86 Akeïropoiete, le visage
du roi éclaté par l’art au soleil couchant avec l’aube (with its broken
black circle upon white, its appearing-disappearing face, its blue ske-
letal hand imprints, its ampersand and its other undefinable micro-
forms) lack aesthetic justesse; on the contrary their ‘orchestration’ and
‘finish’ seem impeccable. Kermarrec is that artist who ‘dreams up for
himself, as he encourages himself to do, a para-saidness’ – a para-dit,
as he wittily and, given his melancholia, punchily, writes. Such a
pseudo-paradise, however, as Jacques Sojcher perceptively remarks,
offers us the message of its secrecy. As the title of the 2007 exhibition
Bruissements d’Ostende hints, the ‘logic’ of works such as those just
mentioned or the 1995 Ontbijtjes or the utterly strange Attente, 999
fois découpée pour le dessin, never achieves articulation other than via
their intrinsicalness. At best, they offer a murmuring, a whispering of
their dense implicitness.
In effect, I should argue that Joël Kermarrec’s most funda-

mental mode, the most persistent mode of his doing, his poiein, is, as
perhaps with all truly fine artists, that of questioning and searching.
Not his, simple resolution and definition, quick settling of accounts
and equations of easy adequation. To dig into one’s presence to self
and the world, thereby to query and search, may not offer finalities,
for always ‘all remains to be sought’; but at least such (self-) ‘excava-
tion’ allows a certain form of ‘living’, as he tells us. The various fairly
large oil paintings of the late 1970’s titled Fond rouge are not to be
thought of as aesthetic experiments, easy formalist or abstractionist
creations dominated by chromatic or geometric theory, or some banal
refusal of representational art. They bear witness to a searching ‘even
in darkness’, a posing of questions never – and troublingly so –

‘shareable’. As with the extraordinary Quatre vivants of 1983-84, an
ensemble of four largish oils (160 x 130 cm), we certainly enter a
world of exceptional chromatic and formal virtuosity, of rare beauty,
in fact; but such criteria do not take centre stage in an art tussling with
inner darkness and hauntedness – ‘in the game of the four corners,
Kermarrec will remark in connection with his Quatre vivants, a dead
man in the middle’. The sheer ‘mobility’, as Valabrègue writes, of
such works, their exquisite unstabilisableness, means that the pure
plasticity to which Kermarrec’s ongoing searching has given rise, is
their meaning. The questioning that emerges within and via their visi-
bility is their meaning. Yes, Quatre vivants, like other works, and via
its four ‘subtitles’, Homme, Boeuf, Lion, Aigle, proffers implicit, infi-
nitely spinnable micronarrations, but, as with the Fond rouge paint-
ings, or even the 1980-81 Ana – Portrait à la règle bleue or Ana –
Portrait à l’homme de dos, all of our psychologising, autobiographis-
ing, even our simple ekphrasis, cannot, indeed, must not, blind us to
that so easily erasable ‘plenitude of [art’s] surface and constitutive
[plastic] elements’. Camille Debrabant is perfectly right to urge us
never to undervalue the meditative character of Kermarrec’s oeuvre,
its narrative weft. Equally, yet, must we never give up our sense of the
deep occulting silence that bathes this same oeuvre, a half-smiling,
half-anxious sleight-of-hand by which painting ever withdraws with
its left hand what it may seem to offer with one finger, or perhaps oc-
casionally two, of its right hand.
The teasing enigmaticalness of a work such as the 1996 Rose

d’Ispahan pour ma tendre (with its hairy phallic form touched by
some bright pink curlicue, its white-flecked greyish square tilted onto
one of its angles and trailing in its orbit tiny white and pink speckles
and other microforms, its two blue footprints, its tiny white streak
with an accompanying ampersand, all silhouetted against a dark night-
blue fond) or, say, the 1980 Mes demoiselles Alice (with its two ever
so faintly drawn standing female nudes, its phantom chair, its set of
clenched teeth caught in some hairy blue triangle that drips and runs, a
smaller brilliant yellow and orange form utterly indescribable yet with
its vibrant orange-red ampersand, a queen of hearts card hovering high
in the top right corner, adjacent to a few unreadable faint handwritten
words, all emerging from/disappearing into a large creamily nuanced
canvas) – such enigmaticalness may be said to constitute the unsaya-

ble ‘saidness’ of their plasticity, signs that ever reopen what we may
think, describing them, is their fixity, their arrested closedness. Ker-
marrec speaks of the play of such ‘opposites’ as (his) art’s ‘breathing’
– a respiration without clear utterance, a communication of an ambi-
guity, an undecidableness, an unrecordableness at the heart of (his)
art’s flashing, blinking signifiers and signifieds. Obsession is every-
where in Kermarrec, whether it be in the Ardoises or the Boîtes, the
1991 set of small paintings suggestively – we have here the ‘erotic-
ism’ of eating, teeth, mouths, breakfasting, etc. – titled Dame Tartine,
or the 1995 set of Écrans de lassitude, or, again, the photographs or
paintings of La Dame à la cape, or else the quirky funny fetishistic
table-legs and slates simply titled for a special occasion Canne-tête &
ardoise (1994). But, if obsessiveness produces ensembles, grouped
paintings or sculptures – Kermarrec does not see such work as serial,
but rather as a continuous tussling with compelling and shifting signs
–, dismemberment and dispersal, corrosion and erasure are simulta-
neously staged via such gatherings. Thus is it that fragmentation and
continuity coalesce. Thus is it that mutation does not deny a certain
form of coherency and totality. The disparate, the heteroclitic within a
given painting does not, cannot, refute a strange harmonisation of con-
stituent plastic elements. The kind of ‘signifying errancy’ Cyroulnik
sees Kermarrec’s work as performing via its continual coq-à-l’âne be-
comes bizarrely synonymous with an aesthetics – and an ontology, too
– that flees exclusion in its (Rimbaldian) ‘seeing’ of connection, of
reciprocally ‘contaminating’ – Kermarrec’s preferred term – and final-
ly displayed epiphanic constellation of fragmented signs. The reitera-
tive but ever morphing manners of Joël Kermarrec’s work – take any
of the ensembles just mentioned and examine them both internally and
from ensemble to ensemble – indeed constitute, as Frédéric Va-
labrègue has excellently suggested, an ‘erotics’ of form: a constant
reworking of desire, a material-psychic revisitation of the beloved. I
shall return to this shortly in a broader context of motivation and pur-
pose; suffice it to emphasise here the erogenous nature of all reitera-
tion.
What, however briefly, are the tactics of obsessional reitera-

tion and mutation of Kermarrec’s seeming ‘cabinet of curiosities’?
We can point here to the anhistoricity of a work such as, say, Lune et
ombre portée (1983), its preference for the errant, the multiple, the
liberated. This, of course, entails an erasure of the tracks of one’s
emotional and mental journeying, a rendering ‘hieroglyphic’, untran-
slatable the language of autobiography – even assuming such a lan-
guage were available in terms other than the oblique, the indirect. The
‘anagram’ paintings such as the 1996 Torse, peinture charogne à la
perspective de l’Inconstanza or the 2005-7 Dessin de l’été, l’épars
réuni, rire, le calme est sur son erre, or, say, the 1983 Songe de Sartre
en 1942 – such anagrammatical compositions do not simply turn back
to front the articulation of their ‘terms’ and ‘declarations’, they push
their ‘letters’ (gramma) up and down, squeezing A into forms – ‘ana-
graphs’ might be a more appropriate term – that now look like Y or Z,
analogous forms, but understanding the full implications of ana- (with
its pure echo of a-: ana-logical & a-logical). Such anagrammaticality
is an integral part of the joined tactics of collage and brouillage,3 a
confusing (con-fusing), a muddling, but also a seamless melding, of
the seemingly disparate. The 1976-77 oil on canvas, plus object, La
Bonne Face de la Sainte-Victoire, le poids de la peinture, la gravita-
tion universelle demonstrates such a tactic in a (con-)fusing, an enig-
matic compacting of the elements of a title that, try as we may, we
cannot find to coincide rationally with the parallel con-fusion the
painting’s plasticity equally lays before us. Torse Yorric et Je (1982),
a squared oil poised on one of its right angles, similarly melds, inse-
parably and with splendid bafflement, the exquisitely unidentifiable
components of its picturality and the fused, unpunctuated terms of a
title both defying its adherence to such picturality and irrefutably
enacting it. Just as there is, for the viewer, no reliable, stabilisable
mode of decoding works by Joël Kermarrec, so does Kermarrec, at
once making some sort of relatively exuberant peace with this fact and
yet understanding with soberness that it is a fact born of the unavaila-
bility of codes adequate to his own deep expressive needs, boldy elect
to rely upon such shaky, fragile encodings his imagination can pro-
duce. Yves Michaud is right to see here an audacious and original
move, for it is a tactic leaving the painter’s work precariously ba-
lanced on the knife-edge of brilliantly rich communication and sty-
mied exchange. The various Bâtard de chamane works Kermarrec of-
3
Such brouillage, Kermarrec has maintained, with shrewdness, ‘sharpens up reflec-
tion’.
fers us, for example, push artist and viewer to the limits of their semi-
otic and hermeneutic capacities, where sorcery and divining, therapy
and release are ever at stake, where hiddenness and revelation act out
their uncertainties, where some indefinable logos beyond rational re-
ductions and platitudes – truly ana-/a- , yet vaguely intuitable – may
come to function. This, moreover, despite – in effect, precisely be-
cause of – its ‘bastardisation’, its ‘illegitimacy’, its hybrid impurities.
Art, like a pain bâtard: fantastical, though digestible, even delicious.
Two other tactics may be reasonably identified in the gesture

of Joël Kermarrec. Tactics curiously paradoxical, conflictual even,
though inevitably fused: aphorism and metonymy. Take a work such
as Mon pantalon, of which, complicatingly but characteristically, two
‘versions’ exist, both 1972, both canvases plus object, a gold-painted
pair of trousers, both 200 x 160 cm. Whilst one night-blue canvas
shows only a faint trace of trousers through a red-lined grill (pattern),
accentuating rather numerous curious blotches of white (occasionally
humanoid or animal-like), a long oblong box or block of wood, and,
above the barely perceptible trousers imprint, some form vaguely re-
sembling a spool of sorts; the second night-blue canvas reveals two
strong imprints of trousers, other forms being more scattered and ar-
guably less foregrounded, though with echoes of those of the first
painting.4 Aphorism lies here in the utterly terse definition the title
pretends to provide of the painting’s (with the object that cannot be
separated from it) capacity of representation. Of course, such pithy
(self-)definition, supposedly settling once and for all questions per-
taining to content, signification, purpose even, is delightfully tongue-
in-cheek: the aphoristic formulation leads us to a no greater resolution
of the deep pertinence of Kermarrec’s two works. It is almost as if
Magritte’s Ceci n’est pas une pipe were being restaged. Even if these
trousers were Kermarrec’s, his title is tantamount to saying, all at
once, a stone is a stone, painting is painting, ceci n’est pas mon panta-
lon. Truth, definition, representation are stood on their head, rendered
derisory, unfeasible, irrelevant: aphorism is always pseudo-aphoristic,
false, ludic. Z will never be A; just its smiling – and, at times, an-
guishing – dreamy simulacrum. All of Kermarrec’s art articulates such
4
Of course, in painting, foregrounding is but pure illusion: every form has equal
‘presence’. Kermarrec’s work in particular thrusts such equivalence upon us.
statements as to their truth and definableness. Other fine examples I

should point to, where, too, the title is instrumental, are the 1990-99,
Jezabel, paume figure, le mensonge de la peinture, le mot perdu and
Dame, eau, vent, cendre, rien: the language of the designation of the
‘truth in painting’ – one thinks of Derrida5 –, of necessity lost in its
own labyrinths, spinning its own sagas of meaning, standing before the
alluring indeterminacies of painting’s unlanguagebleness – but one
that titles such as these toy with, lovingly, desperately.
What I am calling the tactic of metonymy may arguably be

seen to intersect with that of (pseudo)aphorism in Kermarrec’s
démarche. Naming, via language or plastic form: we have already
seen the problematics of such an act. To add to this ‘phenomenon’ the
quality of meta – betweenness, withness, afterness, laterness, beyond-
ness – is to render clear that both language and art are, precisely, in
relation to raw realness and lividness, metaphenomena; this, moreo-
ver, in addition to the fact that each is the metaphenomenon of the
other: language to the side of art, art to the side of language. No coin-
cidence anywhere, unless one accepts the significance – as we surely
do, despite its relativity, its ‘mere relationality’ – of the swirling tauto-
logical universe that language (: titles, commentary, theory, Kermar-
rec’s, mine) and art (: its forms, images, simulacra, masks, illusions),
each separately though ‘virtually’, potentially, notionally in conjunc-
tion, deploy and invent. Take, for example, the 2002-4 Ontbijtje & ...,
a circular oil on canvas (120 cm diameter), a world, a universe in it-
self, with its floating table-like form upon which we see (the illusion
of) a bowl of milk and, perched impossibly on the pseudo-table’s
edge, a knife, and, endless pink- and orange-flecked forms. It is a
scene of breakfasting – an important idea/reality for Kermarrec – real,
shareable, sacred, mystical and much else, we might maintain, a pseu-
do-livedness and dream, desire perhaps, but ever meta: parts standing
for, to the side of, fatally after and beyond, some undecodable whole.
A whole lost, except in its plasticised parts. A naming in plastic forms
in the place of any imaginably direct naming via language. Every form
a meta-nym, never able to complete naming, even were that possible:
the & ..., ampersand and suspension points, reminds us that tropes are
never transitive. Perhaps the Sanskrit trabate, thought to be a partial
5
See Selected Bibliography.
root of tropos, and implying shame (for improper naming), may give
us a further tonality via which to meditate Kermarrec’s art. One fur-
ther example, the recent and delightfully titled square oil on canvas,
Titre à venir-voir-ineffable (à l’oreille rouge) (2004-6), will allow us
to make a final point in respect of Kermarrec’s metonymic strategis-
ing. Against a slightly mottled black pseudo-background (: all is two-
dimensional, of course), we perceive a small vermilion-red (presuma-
bly ear-like), shape, with a tiny green tuft at its base, a long beautifully
multicoloured and slightly twisted pointer-like pen[cil?] with the va-
guest of long cast shadows as well as a sharp, very short shadow. At
the painting’s near-centre a tiny, but characteristic bright comet-like
form orbited by three purple-blue circular dabs whose presence is
echoed by a thin blue stick-like form jutting into (as it were) the bot-
tom left black oil-space. As Kermarrec‘s title suggests (twice), we are,
here, really beyond language, nameableness. Any naming would be
meta. And, too, all plastic form remains meta. This said, metonymy
tends to offer us a name/form that, without further naming, refers us to
B or C or Z, to which it is intimately related and where we can pre-
sume such intimacy of relationship. Titre à venir plunges into an al-
most pure seeing (voir) of this intimacy, even though the latter cannot
be worded. The oreille rouge doesn’t take us far, doesn’t close the gap
opened by meta; but each metonymic fragment (: red ear?, pen(cil)?,
shadows, pseudocomet, black pseudobackcloth, etc.) of the global me-
tonym (: the entire painting), like the global metonym (and its action
or process: metonymy) – all point to an intimacy of relationship be-
tween livedness and art. Metonymy may articulate via a sideways
movement, an evasion, an elusion, a speaking-and-forming-as-
otherness, but it yet offers the nearest form of inner absoluteness de-
spite its radical alterity.
Which leads us to the question of a thematic content in Ker-

marrec’s oeuvre, one we may feel it absurdly impossible to formulate,
yet one critics such as Yves Michaud and Camille Debrabant, but oth-
ers too, argue is far from being beyond our grasp. Michaud suggests,
quite reasonably, that an ‘obsessive, endlessly broken and relaunched
thematic narrative is easily recognisable: power, capture, will to know,
to see and possess, the haunting obsession with losing’; and he adds:
‘unless it isn’t also a haunting obsession with not being able to lose,
not being able to forget – the fact, quite simply, of being obsessed’.
All of this, of course, as Michaud rightly insists, constituting a mirror

of ‘our own obsessions over possession, seduction and abandonment,
tenderness and hatred, obsessedness and nightmare’. Naturally, one
could without problem expand Michaud’s broad list: uncertainty, am-
biguity, ‘vanity’, disappointment, derision, tragicomicalness, the ‘fail-
ure’ of both representation and livedness – the dispersal and fragmen-
tation ever at work despite art’s transmutations and life’s pleasures.
Still, to look at a work such as the 1996-98 Torse, Peinture, Charogne
à la tache jaune de l’indécision does not readily reveal indecisiveness,
let alone any decaying carcass: painting, yes, brilliant, vibrant, won-
derfully and strangely inventive; but no manifest visual traces of what
elements of the title suggest: transmutation is a superb success, a mar-
vellous oneiric plastic facelift. The 2004-6 diptych, Les deux mondes,
two exquisite circular oils (120 cm diameter): a work such as this de-
fies all thematic analysis, assuming via its beautifully delicate and
nuanced chromatics the full purity of a plasticity determined either
momentarily to transcend doubt and anguish or to sing with full aes-
thetic voice those instants of high upliftment and oneiric vision Ker-
marrec ever remains magnificently capable of laying before us via his
chromatic and formal distillations. Cousseau is right to speak of this
art as the strangest of ‘encyclopedic utopias’, a ‘wonderland’ often
belying any melancholia and mourning that may underpin it. When we
gaze upon the teeming signs the Ardoises generate, the elegantly dis-
creet, ever shifting, but aesthetically coherent ensemble of small (19 x
14 cm) works titled Als ik kan: modèle et rêve (1992), or, again, the
2004 mixed technique on paper, Des petits riens que je raconte – but,
truly, any work would do – we can appreciate that we have here an
artist understanding the complexity of the psyche, its swirling con-
tents, its situatedness with respect to the ‘real’, the ‘model’ and yet its
endless capacity for ‘transcendence’ of the latter, a dreaming and free
meditation beyond them, beyond the grip of their flagrancy. Art as
self-portraiture, but showing, ever recreating the secret and infinite
face(s) of selfness – and knowing, as Kermarrec indeed knows, that all
such faces ‘lead [the observer – both self and other] straight to his or
her own physicalness and surreptitiously to his or her history’. Art as a
place/non-place, a symbolic, obliquely articulated figuration of that
Reverdian dream of ‘consubstantiation’ of self and world, a reversal
of the equation of loss and disempowerment to which self may have
seemed fated to succumb. If the recurrence of skulls, disconcerting
terms in certain titles, ironies of all kinds, indeed disturb the logic of
such reversal and, as Philippe Cyroulnik suggests, ‘a joyful vanity
[yet] wears the colours of melancholy’, Kermarrec’s self-portraiture
remains committed to a dream of art, one as visible in, say, his power-
ful 1961 Indian ink on paper Nu féminin assis or his remarkable 1969
mixed technique Sans titre works, as in the 1981 diptych (drawing and
collage on paper) Petite cosmogonie – mots disloqués – le chiffre et
l’intercesseur or else the 1994 ever revamped, ever hypnotically rivet-
ing mixed technique on paper Ontbijtje. A dream steeped in obsessive
thoughts and emotions, but pushing far beyond into the realm of ‘that
emotion called poetry’.6
But what, then, can we say with regard to the purpose of art,
when Kermarrec seems prepared to shut down all manoeuvrability in
denying art all ‘transcendental or psychological justification’. There
are a number of important points to be raised here, and I shall proceed
compactly:
1: Kermarrec recognises that doing can be understood and

lived as a relative ‘end’ – its endlessness being deemable as a
‘construction despite all’: works such as the untitled, but an-
notated Doel-me/la Hache de Lessines & la tentation de de-
mander à AD où se trouve le Doelme de la mélancolie (1993)
– ably discussed by Camille Debrabant with respect to their
figures de style – show that, precisely despite powerfully im-
plicit raw emotions (death, mourning, melancholia), the act,
the gesturality, the pure and gritty doing of art, its driving, on-
going poiein can eke out something where nothingness ap-
pears poised to prevail;
2: the question of purpose can be recontextualised if art can be

truly seen to elude the claims of truth, reality, representation
viewed conventionally: artifice, play, what Michel Deguy
terms the being-as-or-like, l’être-comme of all figural doing,7
become in this perspective the only truth and reality available:
the photographs accompanying Georges-Emmanuel Hourant’s
6
Cf, Pierre Reverdy’s Cette émotion appelée poésie (Flammarion, 1974).
7
See, for example, Deguy’s Actes (Gallimard, 1966) and also my discussion of such
matters in Michel Deguy (Rodopi, 1988).
poem in Comme une autre place qui serait la mienne (2003)

or the postcards constituting Mauvais sourire et fausse marine
(1992-97) thus contain and silently render visible the tense
unanchorable ludicity of a purpose folded deep into the cagey,
guileful and artificial truth, if I may call it that, of their pure
doing;
3: art for Kermarrec may be thought of as generating, as Va-

labrègue has written, ‘a speculative oeuvre’ – speculative and
specular becomes its purposing; its forms prove nothing other
than the energy of the gesture that underpins and produces
them; such purposing is dubious, precarious, ever on shaky
ground, realising itself in a strange distorting-reforming mir-
ror where shapes constitute a (non-)place, a non-lieu, of, yet,
intensity, a dogged but brilliant professing of determined non-
surrender and half-smiling, half-resisting unpresumptuous-
ness. The early Sans titre (1966: cat. 25, Étalon pré-
posthume) or, say, the 1990-92 La Jubilation de Jezabel au
carré rouge et à l’éventail-ciel testify in very different but ut-
terly complementary ways to such a programme of art pulling
itself up by the bootstraps;
4: art – it is Kermarrec himself who recognises it – ‘moving

ahead via an “atheological” metaphysics’: art extending its
speculation and specularity into the realm of a (hopeless?)
questioning of origin and death, and hence of (the purpose of)
being itself; a metaphysics teetering on the brink of the esoter-
ic, the abstruse, but caught between the hard, undreaming
energies of mockery and implicit angst: lest we think that the
painter who can toy with the concept of the divino artista,
who can understand that, as Valabrègue suggests, Kermarrec’s
is a ‘metaphysics of illusion, of the relativisation of ends’ –
lest we think such a painter cannot be taken seriously in meta-
physical terms, we should peruse with equal seriousness a
painting such as the justly celebrated Rêvant d’être un papil-
lon dans le rêve d’un papillon (1986-87), or else the 1991 en-
semble of works titled Pinocchio, au pays de l’éternelle
déception des images: profound are the metaphysical implica-
tions of works such as these, complexified as they are by atti-
tude and manner;
5: art, in effect, as what, in Le Fil de la toile, Joël Kermarrec

will call ‘an initiatory fiction’: a lure, an artifice, a deception,
a shimmering (self-re)invention that finds within its very
doing, an unhopeless purposing that, just conceivably, via its
self-exploration, may provide some initiation – some entry,
some beginning – with regard to the enigmas, both wonders
and worries, of self’s being-and-doing-in-the-world: the strik-
ing 1993 piece from the Chasse au Mélode, Doel-me & Old
mee ensemble (cat. no. 95, Ardoise, petits papiers & ...), with
its annotation that serves to title it, & l’ombre, reveals an artist
tussling with fundamentals, blackness and whiteness, square
and circle, livingness and crucifixion, and the implications of
all initiation: the unknown, the shadowiness, the à-venir, the
endless supplementarity symbolised by the omnipresent am-
persand – which yet does not drown out the energy of art’s
ongoing initiatory purposing;
6: if, then, for Kermarrec, art may seem to find an adequate

purpose in the ironies and laughter that, indeed, abound in its
plastic gestures and can be confirmed in the jottings of Le Fil
de la toile over a substantial period of time, we yet need to
think through what this implies: does irony necessarily force
purpose to spin about, endlessly, on its head? does it always
constitute a mindset of sharp, even cutting irreverence? is it
even ‘dangerous’, as Kermarrec notes Kierkegaard to be
warning us? can it be seen, as Kermarrec perhaps thinks at
times, as, quite simply, ‘the moment of questioning’, the ne-
cessary consequence of all opening of debate? just how close
can irony be to what Kermarrec terms ‘transcendence’? and,
to crown it all, does the artist of irony not suggest to us that
‘to have anyone believe in irony is the only irony’? Suffice it
to say, for lack of space, that the nature and the purpose of
irony, its desirability, its surface seductions and its conceiva-
ble dubiousness, are constantly meditated throughout Joël
Kermarrec’s writings and his plastic oeuvre, whether it be the
1974-78 ensemble Ce qui a été sera, the 1995 ensemble of
small oil on wood ovals, L’Effroi, rien et tout, or the 2004-6
Titre à venir-voir-ineffable (au carré vert) with, this time, its
pair of mottled yellow ‘ears’ matching the red-ear painting we

spoke of above;
7: art, Kermarrec’s, as what Denis Roche has charmingly and

perceptively seen as an ‘untimely and festive Nataraja’, a
dance of Shiva, a swirling, ironising, multiple, continual erot-
ics of creation whereby derisiveness embraces, falls in ‘love’
with, joy, delight, becomes a kind of orgasmic release allow-
ing death and la petite mort to shed their seeming binarity,
generate an always pseudo, artful ‘mysticism’ of the self’s
bodily and psychical poiein: what are the extraordinary Boîtes
of the late 70’s and early 80’s, the fantastical Bâtard de cha-
mane works, indeed all of the recently gifted works of such
astonishing versatility now with the École nationale
supérieure des beaux-arts de Paris (and revealed via the 2010
publication of Joël Kermarrec: Étalon pré-posthume) – what,
if not this ceaseless, many-limbed and self-exhausting/self-
constituting dance?
My final remarks will centre around a few of Kermarrec’s

most recent works: the 1999-2005 two-piece oil on canvas La Femme
d’Aristote ou le problème XXX et un hommage à la cruche de Bacchus
de V; the 2004 Autoportrait métallique, le premier et le troisième; the
2006 Ex frère ‘trilogy’ of tilted oval oils with sometime supplements;
the 2002-5 Anekdoton oil on canvas; and the 1989-92 + 2001-3 circu-
lar oil, Paume, carré, crâne, le reste. I have not spoken of conceivable
influences, affinities and fascinations, literary or plastic, pertinent to
the yet powerfully original oeuvre of Kermarrec, preferring to privi-
lege the high specifics of the latter. I shall merely say here, however,
for the subject would require very considerably more space than I dis-
pose of, that such interpertinences can range from the understandably
most oblique to the clear reference via either written or visual, quota-
tion, from the poetry of René Char, Benjamin Péret, or Francis Ponge,
through the writings of Kiekegaard, Gracq, Bataille, Leiris, Blanchot
or Caillois, to the art of Magritte, Jasper Johns, Klimt, Klossowski,
Ensor, Spillaert and others. It is enough to say that the gamut of fasci-
nation is clearly immense – surrealism, spirituality, sacredness, erotic-
ism, ethics, absurdity, ‘disaster’, désoeuvrement, fictionality and ‘lie’
and illusion in art and language, the claims yet of earth, place, the vis-
cerally lived, aesthetic freedom and discipline, and so on – but that its
traces are almost always implicit as the gesture of Kermarrec imposes

its unique markings and developments upon his wide-ranging readings
and aesthetic appreciations. If we take, by way of example, the first
painting mentioned immediately above, La Femme d’Aristote, we can
straightaway comprehend that there can be no question of tracking
down any of the above other than in the most intangible of terms. We
search in vain for clear plastic echoes of Aristotle’s wife, even if we
see in the skeleton an echo of Pythias’ death; and, even if we interpret
the painting as a homage to Velasquez’ Feast of Bacchus, otherwise
known as The Drunkards, such critical musings remain unstable, un-
completable, and in effect never can supercede the global impact of a
plasticity far in excess of strict representationalness. Meaning attribut-
able to some externality flickers, ever falters, scrambles its traces, del-
ights in erasure – whilst at the same time revealing a rich implicitness
beyond the flagrantly personal. Meaning, here, may be thought of as
open, even infinite orientation (sens), an ever ongoing directionality of
thought become chromaticity and form loosely, wittily (and yet se-
riously, ungratuitously) attached to a few verbal enticements. As with,
say, Autoportrait métallique, le premier et le troisième, meaning slips,
slides about within the confines and via the modes, most essentially,
of pure plasticity. Its circulation does not have an evident end, an ab-
solute horizon in mind, cannot be given one. It is the ‘theory’, the
theoria – process, parading – of itself. Part of the endlessness I have
spoken of. But if the plasticity of La Femme d’Aristote (: large vertical
red ear-like form with embedded feather and its tiny shadow, floating
skeletal form, brilliant blue smoky cloud with one of the painting’s
three small yellow squares, certain truly indescribable dirtyish forms
bottom middle, a very tiny white ring-circle with its minute shadow –
and then there is the jug in its own variegated red-orange diamond-
square, with small mottled white square and other tiny forms) and if
that of Autoportrait métallique (with its exploded brilliantly multico-
loured ‘map’ of some inner secret world only chromatics can convey,
its stark black grill overlaying various polygonal [: precisely many-
sided and closed] fragments floating in the upper right quadrant of this
anti-map, its pallid grey face and bust bottom centre, with its partial
black ‘shadow’ strangely reminiscent of Kermarrec’s many Dame à la
cape, and its large bright red reversed curlicue of a question mark
spurting from the grey head, and, in the bottom left corner, a sharp-
angled black near-square) – if such works can give rise to a kind of
esotericism, a swirling ‘mean-ing’, a self-contained never-ending cir-

culation of enigmatic ‘interior’ signification, yet do they found their
plastic non-lieu, their unspace, only just above the claims of the earth,
its daily preoccupations: being and non-being, beauty and death or
‘vanity’-futility-illusion, the self’s psychical complexity, its becoming
and its fragmenting, its moments of darkness and those of brilliance.
There is, in short, ever present in these paintings, but shimmering to
the point of near-imperceptibleness, what Camille Debrabant, speak-
ing of Pinocchio and Hallali pour Doel-me à Lessines and Chasse au
Mélode, Doel-me & Old mee, has called a ‘secret logic of assembly’.
The three oval oil on canvas works of 2006, each 116 x 89 cm, each
titled Ex frère, viewed exclusively from a plastic, visual perspective,
reveal nothing of the ‘model’, the raw emotional, psychical, spiritual
or other intensities that, presumably, motivate their creation. Modèle,
here, as elsewhere, now ludicly and ironically, now with melancholy
and gentler meditation, deforms, de-realises, deconstructs, becomes
those multiple and at once obscure and yet luminously proffered,
those secret and yet densely and desiringly meaningful reformations,
transformations, imagos Kermarrec wittily calls mélode, doel-me and
old-mee in the works Debrabant examines. Erase the title’s mention of
brother (and with it all biographical implicitness) and the Ex frère
paintings float back totally into their enigmatic plastic freedom and
purity; retain the titles, as we must, and a faintest horizon of raw emo-
tion gleams: it is simultaneously essential, an intrinsic element of a
‘metonymy of desire’ in which the paintings originate, providing their
urgency as well as their original plastic intensity, and, let it be said,
beauty; but inessential, too: we are now, with the Ex frère works, in
the brimming realm of vertiginously transmuted and veiled significa-
tion and value. Plasticity is, now, the place of all meaning, surging,
vacillating, fading, regenerative, poetic, unfettered, infinite, transfig-
ured. The 2002-4 Anekdoton, a large (150 x 135 cm) oil, presents us
with an anecdotalness turned inside out, stripped of its ‘authorialness’,
transcendent of the quotidian details (good or bad) of finiteness. Its
‘story’ is, in effect, as ever, the story of chromatics and form, their
power, their claims, their dreams, their strange feasibilities. At most –
but this remains a considerable achievement – Anekdoton points to the
unfathomable, mysterious, even magical, mystical and miraculous fact
that anything at all is, and that what is deploys the infinite puzzle-
ments of its storiedness as we live and perceive it. The visualness, the
‘visibility’ of Anekdoton is not truly amenable to an ekphrasis seeking

to go beyond mere (and already extremely difficult) description. We
are now, with Anekdoton, or with the beautiful Paume, carré, crâne, le
reste, a painting worked on for over fourteen years, in the realm of
hermeneutic indeterminacy, an undecidableness and ceaselessly surg-
ing interpretive supplementarity. But, of course, value, ontological
pertinence, lies in this very fact, just as it lies in a beauty – or, if one
prefers, a strangeness –, plastic, aesthetic, poetic. Such value, of
Paume, carré, crâne, le reste, let us say, lies in its inarticulatableness,
an unspeakableness yet spoken, rendered visually symphonic, metas-
tasised, constellated yet ever mobile. It is a value of ambiguity and
clarity fused, deep uncertainty and imagined shownness, beyond cate-
gory and rational placement. But real, there, created, epiphanic, lumi-
nously orange red, starkly black, speckled and feathery and creamy,
bearing the marks of humanity and yet ever wrestling, and sublimely
so, melding matter and dream, consciousness and the unconscious,
symbol and myth, with a mean-ing, an ongoing mystery of incarna-
tion, in excess of all signs and signings, beyond its own deceptiveness
and, no doubt, the déception that attends them in the endless tussle of
shifting codes and telluric undecodableness.
THE PLASTIC LIFE OF THE PSYCHE:
DANIÈLE PERRONNE
Let us begin at the generally recognised beginning – although

all plastic, aesthetic beginnings plunge their roots deep, and incalcula-
bly, into a richly fertilising soil of consciousness, sensuality and emo-
tion – and speak, firstly, of Danièle Perronne’s rope works of the early
1980’s, works, as Pierre Rappo suggests, intensely physical, there in
all their loose and bound fibrousness, yet ‘metaphysical’ too, cata-
pulted into some poetic, strangely interior space that their many daily
uses deny.1 Objects recovering, in silence, something of their ‘total
power of language and meaning, their almost naked clarity’. The 1981
Suspension de cordes marines (diameter 40 cm) reveals a thick old
piece of rope curled into an aerated mass, adorned, distracted from its
former labours with the profuseness of thin, tangled and dangling
strings, rope infants crawling over and aimlessly caressing their parent
body, the whole hanging, dancing, in any ambient breeze – yet caught
in a space-time now all its own. Such ropes, their teeming resonance
of sea and air, manipulating hands and wood and metal adjacencies
receding into the intrinsic lyricism of their being, may further empha-
sise their withdrawal from the utilitarian in works such as Corde dans
une boîte (1981). Here, we may be tempted to insist upon the protec-
tion of the seemingly minimal, an honouring, a consecration even, of
what Pierre Dhainaut terms ‘the poverty of the elements used’. There
is, however, no derision or ludicity as with Manzoni’s Merda
d’artista; rather Perronne invites us to sense the strange preciousness
of a particular material ‘presence’ caught, enshrined, yet beyond all
fetishism, in the energy of its stilled and suspended movement un-
folded before us in the ‘unknown realm’ (as Jean-François Leblond
writes) of its intrinsicalness.
But this beginning can quickly be seen to show its hybridity:

already can be appreciated what will turn out to be Danièle Perronne’s
life-long fascination with boxes, those spaces – though they remain,
1
See Selected Bibliography. A personal website may be consulted: www.perronne.fr.
too, objects in their own right, just as a theatrical stage, and indeed the
entire theatre, cannot be divorced from its performances, its contained
dramatisations and spectacles – of framing, gathering, presentation.
And then, already too, in 1981, we witness Perronne’s gentle, deeply
contemplative obsession with cloth, especially white cloth, and cloth
with its richly varying plis, its foldingness, its unfoldedness. Per-
ronne’s various plis blancs of the 1981-84 period, often being desig-
nated simply Sans titre, offer softness and crispness, vast plains of
what Pierre Garnier happily calls some ‘cerebral far North’, and ex-
quisite vortices or spectacularly starred and starchy high reliefs. Her
folds gather and open, reveal seeming slits and partitions that yet do
not divide oneness, the music of some unstated One. They may fall,
hang, display freely ranging verticalities that, too, speak of ascension;
or they may ball and clump, curve and spin their circularities. If there
is no evidence to support Pierre Rappo’s claim that such art consti-
tutes ‘a means of struggling against illness’ – we know, of course, of
many writers and artists who would deem art’s doing, its poiein, to be
a consolatio, a resistance to and even transcendence of suffering,
however experienced2 – it is that all autobiography, all anecdotality
dissolve away in Danièle Perronne’s work, not so as to evacuate the
real, operate some radical hygienic leap into some dreamed aesthetic
purity, but better to allow access to the mythical, poetic potential of a
reality – cloth, rope, wood – masked by its apparent and discarded uti-
litarian ‘insignificance’.3 La Grande Reprise of 1982 is a large (90 x
130 cm) white ‘sheet-unpainting’, we might (clumsily, it is true) term
it – for conventional canvas disappears and paint is replaced by the
bleachedness of white cloth and the tweaking (and small patching-
collaging) of the latter to form a few largely vertical ridges upon an
otherwise bare expanse. Works like this or the various Sans titre of the
same year strike us as establishing a space, of sensuousness and medi-
tation, ‘both near and far’, as Dhainaut has put it, or in the words of
Jacques Lepage, a space reaching out to some ‘vertiginous point
where the void gapes open, an unplaceable abyss totalising being and
2
Sophie Calle, Niki de Saint Phalle and Louise Bourgeois have all spoken at times in
this manner, but of course the work of writers from Scève to Mallarmé to Proust may
be said to be founded on similar emotional ground.
3
Michel Deguy’s wonderful ‘L’insignifiant’ bears reading in this context (Figura-
tions, 1969, Gallimard).
The Plastic Life of the Psyche: Danièle Perronne 149
universe’. The landscapes folded and unfolded before us, though dis-
creet, radically understated, seem to harmonise with a certain ascetic-
ism, a solitary experience of being, but they load no emotionally abso-
lute dice: nothing here disallows ecstasy or serenity, any more than it
urges melancholy, a sense of loss or abandonment. And then there are
those exquisitely delicate Sans titre of 1983 and 1984, noticeably dif-
ferent in format (35 x 45 x 3 cm and 90 x 130 cm, respectively),
where the landscape is suddenly convulsed into a beauty à la Breton, a
beauty of phantasm, desire, dream, otherness, a beauty where pain and
sheer elegance, the fire of eros and the beyond-passion of agapè turn
inside out the presumed humdrum realness of a few bits of old bed-
sheeting. The 1982 Suite de cinq panneaux (each panel 60 x 60 cm)
possesses the profound mystery of the entire universe, imaging at once
its seemingly serene, barely rippled continuity and its partitionedness
(into an infinity of times, spaces, modes, etc), its sleek unified appar-
ent simplicity and the swarming underlying com-plex-ity of its fol-
dedness, all of this accomplished by a few panels of pleated white
cloth, and a discretion reminiscent of the work of Geneviève Asse.
Another 1984 Sans titre returns us to the im-pli-cations of an energy,
the universe’s, the body’s, the mind’s, twisted, contorted, swirling, at
once explosive and implosive, this central figure of energy at the same
time deployed upon and within the symbolically vaster space-time of
the white cloth’s smooth tranquillity – the whole effect brought about
in some tiny creative microspace of 35 x 24 x 15 centimetres. And,
lest we doubt the consciousness the artist herself has of being im-
mersed, via her own gesture of doing and being in a living here and
now of cosmic unfoldingness and enfoldedness, we need only gaze
upon the detail Perronne has chosen to feature of her 1982 Petit pli
blanc, where we may imagine ourselves transported, by the magic of
some powerful poetic microscope or telescope, into the teeming invis-
ible subtext of matter or else the infinite landscape of stars undreamed
– yet this, via the substance of a real very much of our earth. ‘Near
and far’, indeed.
Pierre Garnier has spoken eloquently and admiringly of the

early boîtes, that, too, form an integral part of Danièle Perronne’s
three-pronged aesthetic self-initiation. Already in 1981 we have seen
the wooden box enter the plastic scene in order to contain (though not
to tame) and enshrine (though not to idolatrously worship) the raw
energeia of rope and string entanglements. In the same year we wit-

ness the creation of Boule blanche avec une ficelle dans une boîte. It is
a small (24 x 16 x 10 cm) elegantly bare work revealing the quirkiness
of a suspended string rearing up as if compelled by some snake char-
mer, and, for the first time, we see too that soon-to-be-obsessional
white ball lying still, abundantly implicit and literal simultaneously,
on the box’s bare floor. Other boxes come quickly. There are the two
1982 works, identically titled Petite boîte à fond d’argile, for exam-
ple, the one described as containing ‘a starred Virgin Mary face upon
a glass ball [and] a white metal circle’, the other, plainer, though no
less enigmatic, described as presenting ‘three balls filled with water’.
Or there is the small 1983 Boîte blanche à fond d’argile avec un cer-
cle (19 x 24 x 7 cm) that rivals the Boîte avec une petite boule blanche
in a sparseness shrinking even further via the tininess of the creation
(14 x 17 x 7 cm). With works like these we enter a microworld of poe-
tic puzzlement that yet clearly leaps beyond gratuitousness. A stark,
sober, though illuminated world, offering a theatre of endless reflec-
tion and muted implication: the logics of circularity (circles), origin (:
clay, egg-ball), unified difference (: A + B + C forming Z), limit and
openness (: the box at once containing but never closing), meaning
and uninterpretableness (: of material givenness), and so on. ‘The
landscape of [Perronne’s] boxes is eternity’, Garnier rightly asserts,
and this, although they and their contents remain the material stuff of
our humanness: glass, wood, string, clay, steel, etc. An art of the ‘car-
nal’ and the ‘cosmic’ fused though in ‘extreme tension’ Dhainaut
terms such an art: an art of ambiguity, he adds, though I should see it
as one of plurivalence, an unspeakableness welling up from the un-
conscious and corresponding to what Perronne calls ‘inner necessity’,
whereby self and other, from the centre of their mystery, freely ex-
change and merge their ‘spiritual energy’. Speaking with Garnier in
1981 of the objects to be found in her boîtes – and no doubt such
thinking continues to have its pertinence for our understanding of the
very recent and more manifestly pseudonarrativised boxes we shall
shortly attend to – Danièle Perronne emphasises the psychic resonance
of common objects, their forgotten, silent sacredness known better to
‘archaic societies’. But, she insists, any ‘shamanism’ involved is di-
rected at the self’s personal well-being and implies no sorcery, objects
being resituated in what Pierre Garnier nicely describes as a Noah’s
ark ‘box of meaning’, but one, as Perronne notes, whose landscape (of
meaning, pertinence) remains that of ‘some beyondness’, an unspace

(as we have seen Gérard Titus-Carmel write) that hints at an ontology
only articulatable in plastico-poetic language. The 1984 Boîte à la
roue (40 x 33 x 10 cm), or again a work of the same year given to us
as Intérieur d’une boîte blanche, such works amply deploy that deep,
but unpretentious idiosyncraticalness of Danièle Perronne’s boxes.
What is this tiny [bike or pram] wheel doing, alongside two candles;
what is the circular white hoop doing against this backcloth of bulbous
and fissured clay nomansland? Perplexity and fascination rival one
another. We recognise and do not recognise. We puzzle and we muse.
The sheer earthiness of these microtheatres we cannot fail to feel, and
yet we know we have simultaneously slipped through Cocteau’s Or-
phic mirror to find ourselves in a world of swarming meta-physical
connotations. Nevertheless, our freedom remains absolute and we
sense that no object is constrained, tethered, despite adjacency, conti-
guity. Each boîte, we intuit, has become an exemplary locus of our
pure is-ness, that Apollinairian il y a, a thatness-there all around us in
its intrinsic lyricism, its strange and wondrous song of being.
These works of the 1980’s do not, however, establish a per-

manence of whiteness, light, purity. Perronne’s gesture and instinctive
consciousness never turn away, in some blind denial, from forces,
plastic, material and implicitly psychic, that speak of darkness, ec-
lipse, dense penumbra, what Pierre Dhainaut describes as ‘buried mat-
ter, the abyss within us as within the earth[,] vast germinating and re-
generative obscurity’. Already in certain Plis blancs we are alerted to
a shadowiness ever enfolded into illumination, into the shining revea-
ledness of being.4 But in works like Chaos I and Chaos II (both 1983,
both 80 x 100 cm), cloth blackens, its folds clump and lump, its at-
mospherics becomes heavy, murky, oppressive, despite the sense we
may have of its inevitable remaining link to the luminous and, in con-
sequence, a logic beyond flat binarity and opposition. If it is true that a
work like Sans titre (1984), with its glistening dark sheen and forms
that seem never far from the monstrous, the nightmarish – if it is true
that we sense here a penetration of realms of hellish convulsiveness,
we know too that we are at the heart of a symbolic contemplation of
4
Such imbrication of light and darkness invites a Derridian reading, but we could also
think of Char’s La Nuit talismanique.
the psyche’s intense complexity, its tussle with fear and desire, vulne-
rability and bold confrontation. Pierre Garnier understands that ‘ecsta-
sy’ can be lived in the world of darkness as in the world of whiteness,
no doubt because it is synonymous with awe, a sense of deep wonder
before all that is. And, if, through the folds of whiteness, being’s deep
obscurities may be glimpsed, so too, in the 1984 Sans titre (60 x 60
cm), with its heavy vertical folds in thick black material, or in the
1987 ever untitled Sans titre (35 x 45 x 3 cm), with its chunkily
corded vertical felt bands glued onto a wooden support – so too light
may flicker, whiteness flash and glow, never suggesting some abso-
lute and materio-psychical state dominating our experience of being.
The latter remains without name, title, firm and definitive ‘entitle-
ment’, a magma ‘chaotic’ because unrationalisable, endlessly shifting
in its reality and above all, in its thinkableness. The two very beautiful
Plis de terre ocre rouge, both 1984, both 40 x 40 x 3 cm, and, like so
many of Danièle Perronne’s plis, sculptural, revealing unrevealable
and purely implicit depth in its 3 centimetres, perhaps constitute
something of a pinnacle of aesthetic achievement with fabric. Both are
framed; both evoke the astonishingly complex invagination and cease-
less excrescence, the implosive and explosive manners of physicality,
the universe’s barely imaginable simultaneous (and perhaps syn-
onymous) heterogeneity and unifiedness, the profound mystery of be-
ing’s power to exalt and to frighten, to offer a sublimeness where A
and Z are inseparable.
Two works of the 1986-87 period will serve to emphasise

what I have just argued and, at the same time, usher in a diversifica-
tion in Danièle Perronne’s démarche that will reveal a significant turn
towards, firstly, painting, and secondly, a dramatic return to the art of
the boîte. The first of these two works is the fairly large (100 x 100 x
30 cm) 1986 Revenants, the second the distinctly large (210 x 100 cm)
1987 Tapisserie. Revenants is a most strange piece that Perronne will
subsequently relate to ancient African tribal straw masks or heads. It
offers a great thirty centimetre-protuding wild clump of string and fi-
bre. Two eyes, barely visible, gaze at the viewer through this dense
and dark tousled jungle mounted on a large metre-square support, the
whole hung, simultaneously picture and sculpture, yet escaping both
traditions. La Tapisserie, on the other hand – but hierarchy and abso-
lute distinction remain ceaselessly undone and relative here – gives us
tapestry, a wovenness, an orchestration of the com-plex (: fold or

string upon, with, fold and string), an elegance that reassures, propos-
ing a cultivation of the turbulent, the perhaps otherwise anarchical.
The ancient, ‘primitive’ and obscure forces figured in Revenants – our
ontic ‘ghostliness’, ever lurking below smoothed surface comport-
ments, a drama our media lay before us every hour of every day –
thus, would appear to give way to an art of enlightened entanglement,
a harmonious melding of multiplicity, teeming plurality.
What comes at this point – Perronne’s Journal of 1987-90 –

should not surprise. Its intimacy has not, as I write, been offered to
public exhibition, although the artist has decided to reveal certain of
its painted pages in Danièle Perronne: Oeuvres, 1980-2010. The inti-
macy laid before us here – I have had the opportunity to see the entire
and substantial Journal with its pencilled drawings, its pastels, its san-
guine and its acrylic paintings on Canson paper – lies buried, ab-
stracted, latent and purely lyricised in the many works we have al-
ready examined, as in those we shall soon attend to. The Journal of-
fers to the self a confirmation of that ground, that emotional, spiritual
(in the broadest sense of the term), that dreaming, brooding and mus-
ing humus in which grow the strange flowers of Perronne’s plis, her
cordes, creations such as her early Boîte avec une petite boule
blanche, or the wonderful about-to-bloom acrylics like Numéro 1
(1995) or Le Triptyque de l’horloge (2007), or, yet again, the full and
fecund or, alternately serenely unadorned boxes of the last few years,
Perplexité (2007), for example, or La Jeune Fille (2008). Danièle Per-
ronne’s Journal is many things, but above all it is a celebration of per-
sonal, lived existence – but, and this is what distinguishes it, it is si-
multaneously a celebration of the multifacetted upliftments afforded
by plastic creativity itself. The Portrait de ma nouvelle boîte de pein-
tures acryliques affirms this from the outset, and does so in a land-
scape of Redonesque astral floralness and a facing page of spectacular
chromatic and formal exuberance situated, moreover, beyond all
anecdotal reduction. Delicate, swirling, barely decipherable but yet
hyperpresent love letters bathe in edenic dreamed un-scenes of pure
pigment. Scenarios of death vie with the stunning vitality of the very
elements that evoke such reveries. The language of poets floats eve-
rywhere amongst the artist’s own ‘babblings’, as she can term them,
curling, cascading, flowing endlessly in corners, inhabiting full pages,
loci of energy in themselves or draped about, or in and out of, trees,

bushes, figures on a dream-like half-legible atmosphere of the uncons-
cious. Movement and multiplicity reign. We are in a land of swarming
aesthetic enchantment arisen, raw and delightful, immediate and sud-
den in its poeticity, from the daily swell of mind and emotion. Laugh-
ter, anger, tears, reconciliation, joy and love weave their ever shifting
plastic curlicues, their fountains, their maelstroms and their tranquil
glades of chromatic intensity and sublimeness. Angels descend and
monsters can surge into view in the crowded folds of these paintings,
at times, with their oneiric power, touching the surreal, but ever rooted
in the authenticity of a known and felt real, the undying song of the
self’s being-in-the-world whilst ever sensing the latter’s incalculable
deep otherness. We can only hope that the many folded paintings,
each 55 x 60 cm, of Danièle Perronne’s Journal will one day be un-
folded and exhibited, side by side, in all their unassuming, but all-
consuming grace. For, in so many ways, we may deem them to be the
beautifully intoned but unsung mistress-piece of an entire oeuvre.
1995 is the year in which Danièle Perronne launches herself

into an important and still ongoing adventure with painting taken out
of the private realm so as to inhabit that intensely public and shared
space her earlier cordes, plis and boîtes had from the outset invested.
Certainly, other painted work precedes, stemming from the Journal
and somewhat in the spirit of such intimacy – Sans titre (1992) is a
lovely acrylic diptych, with collaged elements on wooden panels, and
passages from the Cantique des cantiques de Salomon forming waves
upon which ‘ride’ the mixed media elements of an enchanting shrine-
like composition with its green chromatics – but with Numéro 1
(1995) begins a series that, without being consciously conceived of as
a coherent whole, reveals manners and implicit preoccupations ex-
plored, developed, meditated from individual canvas to canvas. To
gaze upon Numéro 1 – and let us realise that such a title seeks in no
way to orient our reading of her work other than chronologically – is
to enter a world of remarkably detailed composition and symmetry, a
chromatic world too of exceptional subtlety. It is not, however, a
geometrically produced world, its mathematics comes from the hand,
not from the compass or slide-rule. Freely drawn, then painted ovals,
circles, omegas dominate in the fabrication of a massive ‘overall’, a
seamlessly continuous mosaical multi-gemmed pseudo-floral jewel of
a canvas where, if we can argue that certain tightly interwoven

forms/chromatics occupy the ‘foreground’ because of their size, it
may equally be maintained that the ‘backcloth’ to such forms, often
structured vertically and in horizontal belts, cannot be distinguished
perspectivally – and, of course, to eliminate perspective involves an
arguable departure from the earth’s spatiality and temporality, and a
simultaneous affirmation of painting as, at once, a bi-dimensional
space of plastic interiority and a locus of imagination’s adimensional
interiorness. ‘A gesture limned / held back / condensed within itself’,
Bernard Noël writes in his poem for the aptly titled book, Un lieu sans
bords, done with Danièle Perronne in 2000 and speaking broadly of
her painting, ‘demanding at once more thereness/more beyondness’.
Certainly, as Noël also points out in his Roman des passages

of 1999, a life is laid down in works such as Perronne’s Numéro 1, or
her equally extraordinary Juin 1997 ou La Fontaine or, again – and I
choose quite arbitrarily – Printemps 1998 or the 1999 Totem (also
titled Le 1er février), but life is finely, patiently, distilled, ‘decanted’,
as Pierre Reverdy argued of all art, laid down as a vast gesture of au-
tobiopoièse, to borrow this time Michel Deguy’s term.5 Life, that of
body and mind, deployed beyond all recognition of its earthiness, laid
down as a painting of paintng, the ‘poem of the poem’, as Deguy
(again) once described it.6 Perronne herself likes, rather, to quote
Nietzsche’s vision of ‘art [as] the musical mirror of the world’, seeing
her paintings as musical partitions, and, in consequence, beyond the
constraints of language, its ‘divisiveness’, its obsessive requirement of
analysis, definition, categorising limitation of being’s dance. Paintings
such as Perronne’s are almost unimaginably intricate, they appear to
vibrate and swim and float in a yet stilled infinity, often, as in Juin
1997, bathing in that ‘luminous lymph [which is, as Noël rightly sug-
gests,] the binding element of [her painting’s] cell-like particles’ – an
element Perronne herself often sees as reminiscent of the blues of Fra
Angelico. Perronne’s Printemps 1998 or Totem should not be seen as
decorative, withdrawn into some self-satisfied aestheticism. Their cre-
5
See Deguy’s Jumelages/Made in USA (Seuil, 1978).
6
Beyond what may be thought of as factuality or that hum-drum ‘self-story’ of which
Deguy can equally speak, distilled rather into the strange ‘poieiticity’ of the bio, into
a selfness and a beingness of art.
ative processs and their plastic actuality are steeped in meditation, a

querying of human and cosmic order, and, in consequence, the latter’s
orientation, direction. The suspendedness of the painting’s teeming
particles and movements, the impossibility of attributing to the latter
definitive (symbolic) orientation, constitutes, in Perronne’s eyes, a
plastic questioning of the nature, the locus, the pointedness of our
beingness. If in purely personal emotional terms Perronne desires
‘some spiritual ascension’, this simultaneously and in (only) seeming
contradiction with her rationalised atheistic take on existence – and
she cites Newman’s view that today’s ‘cathedrals’ rise up from the
self, from its secret affective and psychic life, rather than from Chris-
tic or other religious belief – she appreciates that art, her Numéro 1 or
Novembre 1998 (with its play of light and darkness, its exploding and
curling signs of chromatico-formal energy) or Totem (with its vertical
panels of endlessly dovetailing and unsituatable and finally indescrib-
able shapes and brilliantly hued entities), does not lend itself to stable
interpretation, meaning residing rather, and royally, in its infinite con-
templatableness, an ‘ambiguity’ that is ever regenerative, offering ge-
nesis, an ever querying recommencement and rejigging of conscious-
ness.
Perronne’s painting of the next decade or so, right up to the

present day, does not content itself with these earlier plastic explora-
tions, ever shifting its chromatic focus, its structural manner, as well
as conceptual self-perception – and this, without ever losing a funda-
mental and deeply original identity. Take, for example, Le 1er sep-
tembre 2001, where we are perhaps surprised to find a chromatics of
sepia or what the artist prefers to call red ochre, a modal shift Danièle
Perronne will continue occasionally to experiment with (Le 17 août
2000 is a consciously articulated Variation du Numéro 1, giving, of
course, a radically different atmospherics). Complexity of structure
remains, but already subdued elements of verticality (pale short thin
‘poles’) are further softened by swarming, swimming, curvaceous
amoebic forms overlapping, intermingling, in some sensual dance of
pigment and implicit, but only purely implicit, creative energy. Infini-
ty of the latter, its produceable forms, its processes, the proliferating
relationships thus set in motion, its purposes, values, pertinencies, its
‘programme’ – such infinity we are ever conscious of, as we gaze
upon Le 1er septembre 2001; we sense that the artist’s hand and mind,
though producing this particular image of infinity, of unending creat-

ion, plastic or cosmic, could have – and, in effect, will soon have –
produced, like infinity’s streaming, gushing materiality and psychical-
ness themselves, a painting of utterly different orchestration and tonal-
ity. In this sense, Le 1er Septembre 2001 is a dynamic figure of the
emergence of all manifestations of all that is, all that can be. And, pre-
cisely thereby, it is a living sign of that unity Perronne sees through all
of her painted work.
Le Triptyque de l’horloge (2007) is a large acrylic work (210

x 100 cm) that Danièle Perronne has discussed at some length with
Jean-Philippe Catonné.7 Like many of the boîtes, both the early ones
and those we shall shortly examine of the past four years or so, an ar-
guable thematic of origin, passing of time, mortality and conceivable
transcendence is at play. Certainly, such an argument stems from the
central ‘panel’ of the pseudo retable with its clock, or rather layered
clocks, whose structure seems inverted in the outermost clock, the VI
becoming IA (without the bar) – and, furthermore, such temporal am-
biguity and plurality seems steeped in a meltingness, a diffusion of
time’s form as its relativity, its warpableness melds with the cosmic
features barely limned. Time, in the Triptyque, whirls and spins, bub-
bles and blurs. The first ‘panel’, La Comète, in particular, generates
ellipses, in what Danièle Perronne terms a ‘joyous waltz’, luminous,
elegant, a musica universalis such as a Pythagoras or a Kepler might
perhaps have conceived of such time plunged into the mystery of the
cosmos, between divinity and the pure mathematics of materiality.
The third ‘panel’ of Le Triptyque de l’horloge reveals, and once more
via a chromatics of very great subtlety and intensity, a proliferation of
atomised and pseudoplanetary forms, speckled, starred, ever seeming-
ly birthing from some major luminous, radiating source placed at the
top of the painting, a source beyond numbers though clock-like, flow-
ing forth timeless time, an ongoingness far beyond human designa-
tions. The implications – but they remain only that, latent, unstable,
anthropomorphic – thrust mortality up against (though not in opposi-
tion to) eternalness; evoke a cosmic scenario of endless transformation
of being’s manifestations; remind us of the manner in which con-
7
A CD of Catonné’s exchanges with Perronne is available via the artist’s own web-
site.
sciousness dreams and projects its representations and imaginings of

being, its logic, its functionings; and so on. Speaking of L’Horloge des
sables, also 2007, in which clocks once again feature their prolifera-
tive, warping and interlocking propensities, Perronne tells Jean-
Philippe Catonné that ‘the clock’s mechanism evokes for me Aris-
totle’s god of metaphysics’ and that Bernard Noël’s notion of passage
in his study of her painting originated in what she herself sees as her
own sense (and spontaneous portrayal) of ‘time’s passing into a be-
yondness of time’, a passing that, because it involves a meditation of
seeming polarities (that would yet be diffused into relationality, even
equivalency, unity, via the movement of A > A+ (or B, or Z), reflects
Perronne’s own only seemingly paradoxical embrace of, simultan-
eously, an atheistic materialism of the unknowable and a mysticism
where the divine, though equally unnameable, is lived and felt as a
force of transcendent power and awing beauty.
If the 60 x 60 cm 2007 acrylic Le 15 août displays similar

preoccupations to those arguably at the centre of Le Triptyque and
L’Horloge des sables, preoccupations at once plastico-chromatic (ra-
diance, circularity, atomisation, blues, reds, luminous whites and a
range of other distinct yet intermingling colorations) and symbolic
(cosmic immenseness, complexity, teeming energies, creation/Crea-
tion, etc.), we observe too angularities, sharp, probing, perhaps com-
bative, violent, implicit representations of the inconceivable tussle of
the creative–destructive transmutational principles at the heart of mat-
ter – and perhaps consciousness, psychicalness, too. A painting such
as this certainly revamps in radical terms the forms and composition
of, say, Juin 1997 ou la Fontaine, seemingly more serenely structured,
stable despite its vast intricacy, but, in effect, pointings, explosive cas-
cadings, vast creative interlockings and becomings remain at stake in
both paintings. One could argue a not dissimilar diversification and
continuity in the brilliant Lever du jour of 2007. Here, a certain com-
positional aeration has come about, as if we were perhaps focussing in
on a particular materio-physical moment or event; we see better the
elegance of simpler forms that yet retain their enigmaticalness, their
mystery; light floods our vision, revealing and dazzling; matter’s
energy proffers configurations slowed down better to self-manifest yet
still defying our comprehension and implicitly caught up in the still
infinite logic of a localised musica universalis. A work such as the
2008 Pluie I takes us even closer in, in our gaze dir-ected towards the
physical realness of matter and the meta-physical implications such
realness may be said to generate, at once masking them and silently
speaking them. Pluie I rains down on the retina the scintillations, the
infinity, the life-givingness of an element we may take for granted.
But, if the structure of Danièle Perronne’s painting, as Garnier rightly
maintains, is poetical, lyrical, so, beyond its dailiness, is that of the
world, here rain. If Pluie I suspends brilliant drops of colour, its sus-
pends too our impulse to depoetise matter, to bypass its sheer, exqui-
site, mysterious and alive beingness, its gift and its beauteousness.
The artist, we have observed, describes her painting as a ‘musical mir-
ror of the world’, whereas Anne Teyssiéras has spoken of the ‘antago-
nistic, complementary, proteiform world’ of Danièle Perronne’s paint-
ing, its capacity to assume ever different forms both of itself and,
symbolically, of the physical world, be it a few beads of rain or the
entire cosmos.
The large (146 x 88 cm) acrylic titled Le 1er février 2007 ou

Cosmogonie is the last of the paintings I should like to look at here,
before turning our attention to Danièle Perronne’s most recent crea-
tions, boxes such as Marie Madeleine (2007), La Fenêtre (2008) and
Vie antérieure (2009). Le 1er février clearly engages with ancient
myths and representations of creation, origination, the seeding, the
procreation (gon) of the cosmos. The latter’s absolute ‘logic’, its cos-
mology, is not itself at stake, but rather the marvellous, astounding
energies, dark and brilliant at once, conflictual, contrastive, and com-
plementary, fusional, almost indistinguishable, synonymous, so far in
excess of language, human logos, do they appear. Jean-Philippe Ca-
tonné reads the small white forms couched securely in some amniotic
fluid as eggs, semen, and, indeed, the entire painting being flooded
with such forms, the universe may be said to be a locus of infinite and
constant, ongoing (self-)fertilisation, coming-into-being and (self-
)mutation, self-differentiation-within-unity. Powerful tensional ener-
gies are portrayed via dramatic forms and configurations and chromat-
ic intensity. Perronne herself looks through such a free figural repre-
sentation of ‘the birth of the world’ and the ‘creation of the universe’
to the process via which both her own work comes about and her self-
ness, her inner being, is in a constant re-creative flux and self-
reconstitution. If, then, Catonné is justified in perceiving in Cosmogo-
nie a ‘celestial combat of Titans’ – and Perronne does not argue

against the idea – we may see it as reflective of that endless intellec-
tual, spiritual and emotional tussle of all psyches, all consciousnesses,
now serene, now turbulent, ever reborn into a strange becoming origi-
nality.
Perronne’s most recent boîtes thrust us into brilliant micro-

theatres rich in a latent narrativity that ever evades declarative thesis,
coherent designation, solidifying self-interpretation. The 2007 Marie
Madeleine offers elegance and relative simplicity without the, again,
relative austerity of the boîtes of the 1980’s. Its fabrication is deemed
by Perronne to be fortuitous, a spontaneous coming together of a re-
production of Leonardo da Vinci’s painting of Mary Magdalene and a
clock spring. There is no clutter, no excess, but a clear-minded justa-
position-cum-fusion of, on the one hand, a symbol of ideal beauty, a
beauty thus plucked from time and its possible ‘abasements’, its seem-
ing diminishing of the human, restored to the ‘good’, the ‘true’, the
atemporalness of divine beauty, and, on the other hand – but the hands
join, clasp one another – time’s supposed violence wrought upon
ideality. La Jeune Fille of 2008 revisits such elements of thought and
plastic modelling, with an equally elegantly reduced yet symbolically
full small boîte (23 x 34 x 5 cm). The year 2007 produces some very
fine works, in effect: La Porte, for example, or La Boîte à l’ange, or
La Grande Boîte bleue, dite Perplexité. La Porte, a box of marginally
increased size compared to that of Marie Madeleine (30 x 40 cm > 40
x 34 cm) is, for Pierre Dhainaut, ‘emblematic’, along with La Fenêtre
(2008), of much of her work with boxes: we are of course faced with
doors, locks, keys, closedness, secrecy, unknownness, potential open-
ing, the possibility of gazing, penetrating via sight, mind, sensing,
consciousness, through opaqueness, even an overtness – which turns
out to be semblance or swarming symbolics, a teeming revealedness
that yet houses invisibleness and invites our querying, feeds our desire
and suggests our seething, unstabilisable complexities. La Porte, like
most of the boîtes of this new period, begins to accumulate and mul-
tiply both its possible conceptual contents and the elements of its plas-
tic fabrication. Wooden planks, an old rusted lock, a collaged san-
guine or red ochre image of a woman’s face and neck, her forehead
wreathed in leaves, other unidentifiable tattered images above and be-
low the face, possibly also collaged: this is what La Porte thrusts be-
fore us. Textures speak their differences, colours their harmonies.

Creative process endlessly works over obsession, unconscious recur-
rence. The box is at once a unified whole and a locus of com-pli-
cation, folded differences. Its fabrication-cum-conception is instinc-
tively oriented, not rationally constructed from a set of a priori no-
tions. La Porte tells, musingly, its a-story, never leading or overde-
termining. In this, it inevitably has links to surrealising process,
dream, le merveilleux, psychic automatism, an antirational freedom
that yet senses some strange magnetism of functioning at its centre.
La Boîte à l’ange et au pectoral de la Nouvelle-Irlande (2007)

provides ample evidence of such processual and plastic fashioning. It
is a place of the raw and the cooked, pure foundness and borrowed
refinement. Catonné speaks of a conjuncture of opposites, of ‘life and
death, health and illness, hope and despair, self-assurance and disar-
ray’. Perronne’s own description suffices to concretise such abstrac-
tion: ‘the tiny white man [...] sits above a dead toad lying at his feet.
The man is imploring this astonishing ‘pectoral’ from New Ireland,
gazing up at it. High above him a phallic ex-voto haloed with sharp
spikes like those used in African nailed fetishes where the nails prob-
ably are sunk deep to also thank magic powers. A rope hangs down –
to hang oneself with? Or else ...? On the right, a Quattrocento angel of
the Annunciation, and, in the basement, a crab is swimming’. And
there are fruits, flowers, vertically stacked logs (: supports?), cloud-
like bits of cotton, a moon-like luminous ball or sphere half-hidden
behind a rustic fence, a white hoop only two-thirds intact, the whole
seemingly set against a painted backcloth of subtle texture and varying
chromatic brilliance. To peer into the impressive arsenal of objects in
the artist’s studio, found or bought at Parisian flea markets, is to ap-
preciate how such heteroclitic ensembles may cohere. Always, how-
ever, an instinctual aesthetic orchestration is apparent in Perronne’s
work: La Boîte à l’ange or La Boîte aux lettres or the 2008 Passions
are not jumbles, a careless casting together of the disparate. They re-
veal a caressive hand and mind, ever sensitive to colour, shape, com-
position, texture, the intrinsic beauty of each element as well as the
aeration of the bizarrely and fascinatingly unified microstage that is
the boîte. Pierre Dhainhaut has rightly argued the pertinence of vertic-
al relationships and correspondences in La Boîte à l’ange as else-
where, but horizontality also operates its osmosis – as well as the chal-
lenging puzzlements of such contiguity and imbric-ations. The aera-

tion always manifest in Perronne’s arrangements may seem to gener-
ate an aesthetics of serene disharmony, but it simultaneously creates a
space in which such disharmony – the vertical connection, say, in
Passions, between the dice, the plant and the lizard below, or else, ho-
rizontally, between dice, tangled white string, apple, woman’s circular
portrait, etc. – may be thought through, appreciated as having secret
poetical and conceptualisable harmonies in addition to their individual
plastico-material aesthetic claims.
Pierre Garnier has seen the recent boîtes of Danièle Perronne

– as he sees all art – as stelae erected against death, the onslaught of
time. Undoubtedly, such an analysis has much validity, but the boîtes
equally, it is the other face of such an argument, delve deep and long
into the sheer exhilaration life’s teeming contents afford: they are,
thus, celebrations, excitements, spontaneously assembled objoies
Francis Ponge might call them, objeux too, though, as I have already
argued, neither idle nor derisory – as they were not for Ponge. La
Grande Boîte bleue, dite Perplexité, certainly, relays concern, anxiety,
irresolution before the enigmas and ceaseless becomings of a human
history that does not seem capable of fulfilling dreams of progress,
harmonised accomplishment, stability. But contemplation and exhor-
tation – in the continuing figure of the tiny ‘philosopher’ perched on
the residue of a Greek temple – persist. Consciousness pursues its
signs, relentlessly. And the boîte is song, lyricalness, poiein; like the
‘eggs’, visible or hidden, Perplexité itself remains the sign, what Per-
ronne refers to as a ‘secret promise’, of new flowerings or birthings.
La Fenêtre (2008), upon first appearance, may seem, in any age of
spiritual scepticism, an ironic reprise of Botticelli’s work representing
the Virgin Mary’s writing of the Magnificat. We know, however, that
such reproductions as figure commonly in Perronne’s boîtes, never
aim to deride, but rather both to honour delicacy, beauty, meditative-
ness, serenity, and to adapt to recent perceptions and intuitions that are
deeply personal. In Perronne’s version of La Fenêtre, as recounted to
Jean-Philippe Catonné in 2008, only the writing hand of the Virgin
Mary, held by the hand of the infant Jesus, remains visible; the gaze of
the angel holding the inkwell is diverted from Mary to a hanging key:
the mystery of the divine is transferred to that of writing and creation
themselves, though exquisite delicacy of human presence and sheer
physicality continues to radiate everywhere. The ‘window’ that is si-

multaneously the opening through which we glimpse the transformed
Botticelli narrative, and the entire boîte itself, is, moreover, partly
veiled: Perronne’s is an art of discretion, semi-revelation; its opening
is onto the interiority of the individual gazer’s understanding, a place
of intimate creation matching that staged within the box. What such an
art celebrates is ultimately the possibility of contemplation, invention
(invenire: to find), reinvention, freedom, non-closure. A celebration of
feasible exuberance in a world that might perplex, for so often ‘nar-
rated’ as a locus of loss, menace and imprisonment.
I bring to an end this critique of an art of high sensitivity and

equally fine-boned subtlety by evoking one more very recent smallish
boîte (19.5 x 17 x 5 cm) bearing at once that unpretentious title, date
of completion and a dual designation: Boîte. Position I et II. Septem-
bre 2009. Here we have, framed within a frame, rough, unfinished
wood that, in the lipped hole probably left by a now missing branch,
reveals an eye, now closed (Position I), its lashes hanging thickly
from its plastic doll’s lid, now open (Position II), riveting, watchful,
fixed upon a world now reflected within it. Position I silently speaks
of the pertinence of sleep, restfulness, dream and an inner life com-
monly understated; of possible refusal, too, perhaps, of fright and
nightmare; of yet, the invisibleness of much of being, or its simple un-
sayableness in visual and ‘concrete’, rationally demonstrable terms;
and so on. Position II, whilst seeming to symbolise all that might ap-
pear to be in opposition to such modes and states, we should no doubt
see as complementary, beyond binarity, fused in fact with the symbol-
ics of Position I’’s remake of Redon’s Les Yeux clos. Observation,
absorption of exteriorness, ‘reality’, nameableness of the latter in the
light of day and rationality, a seenness yet, like the nomination we at-
tach to it, never absolute, for ever rethinkable, changing like Monet’s
haystacks with every blink, every implacably new present: certainly,
Position II stages the silent theatre of such possible conjecture as to
the nature of our seeing and our unseeing. The two ‘positions’, taken
together, articulate, finely and with a delightful raw elegance, the ten-
sionality and complexity Danièle Perronne senses, intuitively knows
and lives at the centre of our inseparable physical-psychical expe-
rience. We enter here, but serenely, beautifully, via art’s equilibration
of proximity and distancing, a powerful symbolic theatre of our
beingness, where an infinity lies, ‘dripping away’, Yves Bonnefoy

would say, at the very heart of what we see as our finiteness, but what
we may dream and even day-dream as our living transcendence of our
strange material flagrancy.
STRUCTURE AND AERATION, FREEDOM
AND THE UNNAMEABLE:
DANIEL DEZEUZE
The notebooks of Daniel Dezeuze, appearing under the un-

spectacular title of Textes et notes 1967-1988, might lead one to be-
lieve that we are to be faced with an art of dry theorisation where so-
ciopolitical thesis reigns over what we might feel is art’s essential
claiming of ease, freedom, its very disinclination to suffer constraints
and dictates of all and every colour. A close reading of these rich and
compactly meditated texts, however, reveals Dezeuze’s overriding de-
sire, and felt need, for a thoroughly informed consciousness of the his-
tory of painting, its limitations and blind spots, its endless remaining
potentialities and renewableness. In short, despite – but, equally, in
consequence of – Dezeuze’s serious dalliance with materialism and
structuralism, despite his refusal of narcissistic lyricism, despite his
refusal of art as a repository of identifiable and externally authorisable
meaning, there is a vigorous embrace, implied in all of these self-
positionings, of openness of debate, an embrace too of art’s energies,
energies that, whilst recognised from the outset, become more visce-
rally lived with the resumption (in the mid-1970’s) of drawing, with
its ephemeralness, its fragileness, its heightened connection to the
body’s immediacy, its intrinsic gesturalness. And from the outset too
Daniel Dezeuze knows that all critical evaluation runs the risk of tip-
ping the scales towards some moral position, a pseudoreligious ideol-
ogy undermining the very openness he feels art can, indeed always
inherently does, generate: ‘Art does not mean, he quotes Barbara Rose
as suggesting, it is’. And so is it that the practice of art, whilst ever,
and essentially, scrutinized by this avid reader of Barthes and Derrida,
Kristeva and Lacan, this reader who completes a doctorate in compar-
ative literature at the Sorbonne, this in the midst of the discussions and
activities of the Supports/Surfaces group – so is it that the practice of
art, from the depths of its silence, its teeming unrepresentableness, ev-
er will trump the abstraction and conceptualisation in which one may
be tempted to immerse it.
The earliest works of Daniel Dezeuze set a tone and establish

modes of doing, of poiein, of poetic discretion and liberation, from
which, globally speaking, his subsequent plastic activity will not de-
part, submitting them rather to infinite variation and renewal.1 (Even
his many drawings of the last thirty or so years, whilst seeming to
cleave Dezeuze’s production in half, are seen by the artist, and impor-
tantly so – I shall return to this – as inseparable from his painted
works.) The silent manifesto that we may see written all over the
1967 Châssis avec feuilles de plastique tendue constitutes, as does all
of Dezeuze’s work, not merely, indeed not at all essentially, a decon-
structive and certainly not an off-handed destructive, gesture. Châssis
reveals painting’s underbelly, points to the components allowing
painting to deploy itself; robs it of the illusion it traditionally has gen-
erated; lets us, literally and metaphorically, see through painting; pre-
pares a clean slate for its continuity, a radically renewed praxis
buoyed up by a bold, serious and unflashy reconceptualisation. There
is, moreover, no rough handling of (the materials of) painting: the
frame, whether hand-made or purchased as is, is simple, unadorned,
but crisply elegant, and it is laid with ease against the museum gallery
wall, which we now understand to be the traditional support we have
ignored in our privileging of the traditional hung scene of shimmering
representation. Other early works of the next few years – Toiles
ajourées (1967), say, or various Échelles de bois (1970), the 1972 Qu-
adrillage de rubans de toile or the 1975 Grand colombage – display
an equal measure of audacity and circumspection, an aesthetics of de-
termined, vigorous refurbishing of the pictorial brought about via a
discriminating and restrained practice stripped of all subjective fla-
grancy. Toiles ajourées thus offers us two white paintings, each
pierced through with over forty fine vertical rectangles, like tiny
meurtrières in the large diptych (2 x 195 x 130 cm), allowing the
viewer to peep through the created, the made, to glimpse at once
‘madeness’ and what lies beyond it and constitutes its larger ‘me-
dium’: walls, other works, people, etc. The various Échelles de bois
of, say, the 1970-76 period, can be truly huge in their overall dimen-
sions, whilst at the same time offering lightness, aeration, minimal-
ness, as well as an ever sharp reminder, via their material delicacy, of
1
See Selected Bibliography. A personal website may also be consulted:
www.danieldezeuze.com.
Structure and Aeration, Freedom and the Unnameable: Daniel Dezeuze 167
art’s capacity to have us simultaneously and fully perceive the earth’s

substance out of which it is woven, the space into which such sub-
stance is projected and which it in turn reveals, and, in a sense lastly,
the artisanal craft underpinning the production of painting. For, we
appreciate too that these vast non-ladders (62 x 422 cm / 300 x 1370
cm / 506 x 135.5 cm, for example) still remain ‘paintings’: they ‘hang’
on gallery or museum walls, they are paintings that show what (the
doing of) painting is, is no longer, can be: all – canvas, surface, sup-
port, frame, paint, etc – is at once taken apart, reassembled, never pre-
cisely thrown away (for ever spectrally present in the viewer’s/artist’s
mind), endlessly and repeatedly (and ever differently) repotentiated:
painting becomes frame, multiple unified frames, frame becomes
painting, wall becomes ‘canvas’, absence of canvas becomes a win-
dow upon infinity, void, the ‘frame’ is stained or painted or unpainted,
‘unpainting’ becomes painting, rigidity of frame- painting is swapped
for supple wooden ribbons, painting’s absolute space can be folded
(rolled) up (clinging to its material origins), matter becomes art yet
represents itself, etc., etc.
Our two remaining initial examples, the large (300 x 300 cm)
Quadrillage de rubans de toile and the Grand colombage of equally
significant dimensions (56 x 689 cm) both proceed in similar, but de-
lightfully shifting manner to invite the viewer to enter the reopened
and ever now reopening space of painting, drawing our attention si-
multaneously and inextricably to art’s reconceivedness and to its em-
beddedness in a materiality we had not thought capable of such supply
adaptive application. The Quadrillage jubilantly and easefully, unag-
gressively, refigures a fundamental ingredient of painterly practice and
conception and makes it, bends it into, painting itself, a splendid see-
through tapestry-like canvas, where canvas reconstitutes itself, sheds
its traditionally required contents, is content with itself, becomes its
own empty yet infinitely potential (non-)content. The Grand colom-
bage is basic, elementary, spartan and ascetic in its huge horizontal
ladder-like form of sparse wood veneer strips, geometrically orches-
trated but just avoiding absolute structural symmetry and enjoying
material suppleness. Painting, here, is both absent and re-presented.
Beyond all mimesis other than in relation to itself and the physical,
corporeal gesture responsible for it, the work offers a serene provoca-
tion as distinct from Dadaist fury or anguish as it is from disdain or
sarcasm. A smiling warmth is conveyed rather, not stemming from

creative pride but, I should maintain, from a recognition of art’s and
matter’s discreet and fused fluidities, malleabilities. As in all structur-
ing, an aesthetic principle remains at play, but Dezeuze’s aestheticism
is of the most understated, self-effacing kind, one that speaks of mat-
ter’s centrality and modestly silences the claims of genial imagination
even if such a work as Grand colombage requires original thinking
and a fundamental renewal of plastic doing.
Daniel Dezeuze’s early work is rooted in, at once, the brief

but intense history of the Supports/Surfaces group arguably culminat-
ing in the large 1970 open-air display of the group’s collective plastic
endeavours in the village of Coaraze; the extensive and related read-
ings and writings Dezeuze’s Textes et notes, 1967-1989 renders abun-
dantly clear, readings and writings both aesthetically significant (ab-
stract and conceptual art, land art, minimal art, etc) and indicative of
sociopolitical theoretical inclinations, psychoanalytical musings,
awareness of the pertinence of the contemporary probing of linguis-
tics, etc; the broader but interwoven discoveries of his six years in the
USA, Mexico and Canada, years manifestly enlarging his aesthetic,
cultural and political thinking. The Coaraze experience allows a firm
confirmation of what Patrick Javault rightly regards as the unwavering
imbrication in Dezeuze’s work of aesthetics and ‘ordinary expe-
rience’. This imbrication is as visible in his various 1982-3 Portes
(pre-existing doors, now smoke-blackened, tarred, now cut into,
painted red with flecking, propped against a white gallery wall) as it is
in his numerous 1995 Réceptacles (with their expertly offhanded and
relaxed and witty recycling of wire mesh, tennis rackets, skis, canes,
metal objects of all sorts, plastic, etc.): an aesthetics of the everyman,
the bricoleur, an aesthetics of intelligent, unfussy and unpretentious
doing, somewhere at an unsituatable centre circled about by arte po-
vere, ‘postminimalism’ (as Christian Besson has suggested, moving
beyond an American minimalism with which Dezeuze has become
thoroughly acquainted), Duchamp, Beuys and even the nouveaux réa-
listes. ‘Ordinary experience’ implies a thinking and doing with what is
at hand, the kind of escape from the ‘heroic’ and the at once hyperin-
tellectualized or narcissistically appropriating historical constraints of
art we can observe Dezeuze accomplishing via, say, his 1975 Claie
inachevée (150 x 63 cm), whereby the ‘finishedness’ of art (of, of
course, Dezeuze’s own Échelles and his 1967 Châssis avec feuille de
plastique tendue or the truly enchanting Quadrillage de rubans de
toile we have seen) is cast aside, its ‘geometry’ accepted for what it is:
that of a somewhat deformed bit of fencing-cum-trellising yet touched
up with paint, thrown from its commonness, its homespun-and-
industrial quotidianness, onto a stage of art where art’s ancestors may
well scream in protest. But Dezeuze gives us, simultaneously, art and
matter, an art where freedom asserts its challenging merits, an art
where, as he says to Olivier Kaeppelin, ‘the off-limits and its gesticu-
lation have replaced meditation on the limits (of the painting)’. New
space, literal and metaphorical, suddenly becomes available via this
liberation: a new poetics of space, but a new practice of spatialities of
painting hitherto undreamt and only available through the experience
of materials used. Painting thus transforms itself into an act and place
of ‘knowledge’, as Patrick Descamps suggests: knowledge of painting
and matter and, above all their inextricableness. Art, thus, whilst al-
ways speaking, in Dezeuze’s eyes, itself, its literalism – the 1975 Tri-
angulation jaune has no lyrical, metaphorical or symbolic agenda, it
speaks no language other than its form(edness), its coloration, its re-
fusal to contain, deploy contents, develop illusion – does succeed, in
the same gesture, in alerting us to its woodiness, its paperiness, its in-
trinsic plasticity. From the very heart of its ‘simplicity’, however, it
generates, rather than the type of formed and semantic closure we may
argue is achieved in a Poussin or a Breugel or a Delacroix, a possibili-
ty, an openness, an unobstructedness that painting’s ‘systems’, as De-
zeuze will term them, have to date denied. Which is why both cubist
art and abstract art are deemed by him to constitute the most signifi-
cant movements of the 20th century. Works such as Dezeuze’s various
Extensibles (1968-1997) or his recent ensemble of Nefs (2000-2001)
are perfect vehicles of such an aesthetics – theory and practice – of
art’s, ‘painting’’s, material and formal inherency. Their constituents
are industrial, ‘neutral’, ‘banal’ – panels of trellising and polyethylene,
respectively. Minimal modification is brought about: some painting or
staining with the Extensibles or Panneaux extensibles (which vary
greatly in size (70 x 23 cm, unfolding to 60 x 55cm; 90 x 340 cm,
folded up to 123 x 49 cm); simple folding and fastening of the large
white polyethylene sheets into the five boat-like Nefs forming a small
(but largish) flotilla (each 22 x 234 x 60 cm). Painting indeed ever ex-
tending itself or sailing forth as itself. Beyond any imposed authority,
seemingly beyond authorialness. For, try as we may, and knowing full

well such work may be said to ‘belong’ to Daniel Dezeuze, here is an
artist who has continually sought to evacuate his own subjectivity and
bestow ‘poetry’ and ‘lyricism’ upon the fundamental materiality of the
existing and the energy of its deployment in the modest (and often
smilingly witty) hands of its servant fleeing status, prestige.
The range of plastic modes thus deployed by this theoretically

self-effacing artist reveals both continuity, repetition, and great and,
indeed, increasing diversification. And yet a unified démarche is ever
manifest, coherent, consequential. The 1975 Cinq carrés dont deux
vides is made of strips of wood veneer, painted; Triangulation magen-
ta, of the same year, where elegance vies with soberness, offers the
same materiality very differently deployed; the small 1992 wood
block, Sans titre, is a ‘found object’, though not in a surrealist sense,
embedded with a swirl of nails and touched up with a little paint; the
many 1993-4 Objets de cueillette are funkily fabricated with pieces of
plastic, wood, various bits of metal and leather; the seemingly one-off
1990 Per una selva oscura, a most lovely maze-like sculpture of con-
siderable dimensions (50 cm high, 600 cm diameter) is made of wal-
nut-stained wood scrupulously crafted; its 1991 non-replica of the
same title (Version annexe) gives us ten freely positionable metals
wheels held still by small wooden blocks, each wheel 20 cm x 60 di-
ameter; the 1992 Vie amoureuse des plantes drawings use a significant
array of materials, as do the Grotesques drawings of 2000: lead pencil,
watercolour, crayon, wash, coloured chalk, charcoal, pen, reed, san-
guine, various inks, etc.; the 2005 Trois diptyques (200 x 70 cm) – I
shall speak later of this and, at length, of Dezeuze’s drawings – offers
painting on wood, alternating black ‘laddering’ and scroll-curtain-like
work; the 2000 Échelle qui perle (200 x 35 x 17 cm) is made of polye-
thylene, glass and wood; the extensive 2002 installation of some forty
works at the Hôtel de Sully, where Dezeuze also accepts the challenge
of what Éric de Chassey terms a ‘dialogue with the historic elements
of [the Hôtel’s] architecture, the decor and paintings of the Duc de
Sully’s collection which benefit from being rehung’. The material
modes involved here are many and I shall return shortly to this major
exhibition. Before proceeding to discuss questions of meaning and
truth that Dezeuze meditates, a discussion followed by analysis of
what we may think of as major fascinations buried in his manner of
plastic production, and, in particular, in the graphic work of La Vie

amoureuse des plantes, the Papillons, the Grotesques and other en-
sembles of drawings, I should add a few necessarily brief observations
emphasising certain modal characteristics of the samplings we have
just attended to:
1: the relative austerity and soberness of Dezeuze’s choice of

materials as well as his treatment thereof: there is no jazzing
up of materially ‘unnoble’ work, at best a discreet deployment
of chromatics both Tosatto and Javault read as a quiet joyous-
ness;
2: the ‘literal’ displaying of the matter of painting, whilst se-

rious and purposed, remains equally tongue-in-cheek, warmly
provocative in its negation of a tradition masking means and
materials in favour of pictorial illusion, a portrayal of what
means and materials are not – yet such negation simultaneous-
ly negates itself in an affirmation of new and overlooked aes-
thetic feasibleness;
3: whilst liberation of painting’s modes of production is

achieved, it yet remains dependent upon a gestural discipline,
control, and indeed, re-image-ination whereby traditional re-
presentation is stood on its head and painting turns back upon
itself and thus only represents itself;
4: Dezeuze’s pseudorepetitious modes within the experience

of, say, the various Portes, and his shifting from, say, Portes
to Échelles, or Extensibles to Objets de cueillette or Récep-
tacles – both reveal a desire for a contrapuntality, a playing
off of Aa against Ab, just as all A’s may play off against –
with, rather than against, perhaps – all B’s or C’s: a rhythmed,
‘musicalised’ (as Dezeuze himself can see it) gathering of in-
div-idual pieces of similar nature, or one offering contrast and
difference within a larger harmony of various ensembles ma-
terially and/or chromatically distinct but intertwined;
5: Dezeuze’s work adopts from the outset a principled practice

of antigenericity: painting, drawing, sculpture fuse, refuse
conventional modelling, materiality and conceptualisation:
one can speak of a certain generic ‘extremism’, but the kind of

art Dezeuze gives us lacks aggressivity, preferring regener-
ativeness, repotentiation, growth, an ever burgeoning, often
smiling, otherness that has no need for category or limit.
In effect – and Dezeuze’s writings can penetratingly and elo-

quently, even if a trifle inflexibly, especially in the heyday of his soci-
opolitically inspired theorisation –, what art/painting produces is a
phenomenon beyond sayableness. Possessing form, but lacking for-
mulatableness. Generating signifiers, but either evacuating all signi-
fieds, or, if we prefer to see things that way, multiplying them to un-
speakable and irreducible implicit infinity. Take, for example, Châssis
aux clavettes rouges (1997), a large (220 x 210 cm) gray-painted
wooden frame, with one vertical central strut and two horizontal ones,
the upper of the two embedded with six red and symmetrically placed
cotter-pins, just like a six-paned window frame without the glass.
Speaking to Olivier Kaeppelin of language in the context of plastic
creation, Dezeuze quotes firstly Bram van Velde (‘To be able to wel-
come the unknown one must be without language’), then Matisse
(‘You must cut out your tongue’). Châssis aux clavettes rouges is the
image/presence of itself. It depends on no interpretive gesture to ex-
plicate and complete it. Its form, texture, chromatics constitute its
meaning, but the latter cannot be articulated in the way, for example,
we may feel a painting by Fragonard, perhaps his famous Balançoire,
or Bonnard’s wonderful Intimité, or, today, Gérard Garouste’s La
Barque et le pêcheur – le pantalon rouge or Martial Raysse’s Le Car-
naval à Périgueux, invite us, require us even, to resort to decipher-
ment, an overlaying of meaning upon what otherwise, we may think,
is pure form, beauteous, skilled perhaps, but utterly lacking without
our burrowing into a representational dimension it does not say, but
which we feel we must. Dezeuze’s work refuses this game, or, if it
cannot prevent totally our attempting to play it, makes us sense its in-
finity, the spiralling enigma of all form, texturedness and chromatici-
ty, and, simultaneously the utter relativity of all speaking of enigma.
The simpler the image, the more evident enigma’s infinity.2 Châssis,
here, then, is as extraordinary a signifier as is, say, a tree or a pebble
2
Of course, all art, Fragonard’s, Bonnard’s, etc., is steeped in a poetics of infinity and
‘impossible discursivity’.
whose signifiers lie beyond naming, in a place of truth imaginable,

inventable, but not offerable as definitive meaning. Of course, we
may say that Châssis speaks referentiality (wood, paint, metal, etc.),
but, as with tree and pebble, to push referentiality into the realm of
signifiedness, is to dream the dream of absolute meaning, of origin. If
we wish to speak of meaning, for Châssis, at best we can say that it
presents its questionableness, a presence that is simultaneously an ab-
sence – though generally, and significantly, a voidedness that is its
own fullness, its own beauty, its own truth, unfixable, jubilatory, an
unfathomable ‘isness’ of what it is, without fond. This can be argued, I
should maintain, for all of Daniel Dezeuze’s works. His 1985 Moïse,
two skis riveted together, forming a longish ladder-like ‘ascensional’
object (147 x 16 x 18 cm), may well toy with us via, precisely (and
most exceptionally), inviting us to go down the cul-de-sac of its witty
title, but clearly such a joke does not constitute a meaning. Nor, it is
important to appreciate, does it imply that Moïse is nonsense or con-
tresens, Dezeuze is quick to insist. The question posed by Dezeuze`s
work, whether it be that of his Réceptacles or his Portes, or even more
recently, of his Retour de Chine pastels and coloured chalk drawings
of 1987-8, or, again, the various pastels of the 1997-2004 period titled
Papillons – the question continually posed generates an unmeaning, if
I may put it that way, which is, as he knows full well, far from any
desire to institute an art of ‘sedation’, soporificalness, or of ‘therapy’,
an art taking itself out of its own already vast, if compact, seemingly
simple inherency. The questioning intrinsic to Réceptacles is
thought’s and matter’s joint open enigmaticalness, a serious playing
with the latter so that we are not inclined to reduce enigma, but rather
revel in it without constraint. It is true that Dezeuze’s Intérieur à Suz-
hou (a 1987 coloured chalk drawing, 110 x 75 cm), as abstract as it is
loosely allusive [: Dezeuze’s travels to China] and his other Retour de
Chine works, like his brilliantly hued pastel Papillons, tend to pull us,
we may feel, away from pure plasticity in the direction of representa-
tion, narrative. Claude Minière, in his thoughtful examination of such
graphic work, argues the impossibility of art’s erasure of narrative
content and, thus, a semantic dimensionality that all images incite the
viewer to develop. If, clearly, faced with even non-mimetic, loosely
evocative forms of domestic interiors or flitting, barely graspable
movements of butterflies, we can generate free-ranging thoughts of a
cultural, sociopolitical, ecological, aesthetic (etc., etc.) nature, it yet
remains that such work does not seek to dwell upon detail, factuality,
firm encoded narrative. Dezeuze’s preference is to point us towards
art’s querying of its capacity for relating to what it is not. There is, in
consequence here, no absolutensess of portrayal. Ephemeralness and
art’s instantaneity of gesture strike us. It is an art without insistence,
agendas other than those inherent in drawing. As a result, drawing
continues to question its own manners of being what it is – ever, cer-
tainly in relation to the matter of what is and our perception of its
enigma -, but equally ever avoiding the trap of fastidious figuration,
all idea of generating message, meaning, some transcendence outside
of plasticity.
What, at this point of our examination of Daniel Dezeuze’s

démarche and plastic production, may we add to our understanding of
the various fascinations his work incarnates? I shall offer nine re-
marks. Firstly, central to Dezeuze’s theory and practice of art/painting
is the fascination of the twinned logic/reality of void and matter,
space’s emptiness and the thereness of objects, things. On the one
hand the sheer if strange and beautifully delicate fullness of canvas in
a work such as the Quadrillage de rubans de toile, or the enigma of
material thereness of the wood veneer strips composing the Grand co-
lombage. On the other hand, the void everywhere manifest, though
clearly not so much ‘visible’ as allowing of the gaze to penetrate the
void’s spatialities to enter into contact with other materiality: an ‘ab-
sence’ allowing for the perception of further ‘presence’. It is an equa-
tion everywhere appreciable in Dezeuze’s work, just as it is emble-
matic of his refusal of speakable, isolatable meaning: matter hemmed
in by its ‘disappearance’, the enigma of space’s ‘emptiness’, the latter
in turn ‘showing’, ‘setting off’ matter’s things, equally enigmatic in
themselves, ‘absent’ equally in their pure unmaterial atomicalness.
Secondly, and in close connection with such preoccupations, De-
zeuze’s work experiences the allurement of compactness, matter’s
density, its solid self-revelation that, in a sense, ‘blocks’ vision of its
inner ‘essential’ structure just as it ‘prevents’ seeing of all else that it
isn’t: the various 1982 Blocs de bois thus simultaneously manifest
their surface, pull us towards their thickness, and, via their strange
monopolising of our gaze, occult all otherness. It is no wonder that,
either alternatively or in the same plastic gesture, Dezeuze so fre-
quently cuts through density, opaqueness, thus aerating, opening, al-
lowing the eye and the mind to perceive more largely, broadly, both
physically and symbolically. The Portes are carved open, a Bloc de
bois will swing open upon its hinge, the Nefs or the latticed wooden
sheets structuring works like the Peintures sur chevalet (1995-8) or
the many Extensibles show the tussle of material compression with the
empty plenitude of air, space, ‘nothingness’. And a third obsession,
which can take various forms, and which relates to these initial obser-
vations, is Dezeuze’s exploration of materials that, intrinsically, fuse
matter’s self-display and aeration via a transparency that is partial,
veiling and blurring though never masking or definitively occulting.
The Gazes découpées et peintes accomplish this feat, showing what
they are, yet, too, the otherness that is both beyond them and curious-
ly, spectrally, part of them. One could point equally to a good deal of
Dezeuze’s drawings, the Vie amourense des plantes, for example,
where form clouds, muddles and obfuscates as much as it may be said
to reveal; or, again, works from the Retour de Chine collection, the
Intérieurs, say, or, too, ‘landscapes’ such as Cascade et rochers, a lar-
gish 1988 pastel (80 x 115 cm) with its tumbling mosaic of line and
colour, or Vision à Pékin (1987), where dazzling pink and mauve
space dominates what we perhaps thought was to be a clear represen-
tation of a Beijing temple and some sort of plant in the vaguest of fo-
regrounds.
The question, indeed the puzzling reality, of finitude and in-

finity, is a fourth element, clearly pertinent to the above, that draws
Dezeuze’s attention. In his response to Olivier Kaeppelin, he writes
that ‘the concepts of finite/infinite shed light upon each other’, and
argues that ‘we are ever and still prisoners of that duality’. To deal
with surface and support, line and form and colour, is, we have seen,
to seek to privilege immanence, demystify art, evacuate its metaphys-
ics and that panoply of significations we may wish to attach to them.
But such aesthetico-sociologico-psychological equations one may in
consequence endeavour to establish via such circumscription and de-
terminacy, such stripped down ‘programming’ of plastic gesture and
reality, Dezeuze clearly comes to appreciate in their ideological rela-
tivity, the degree to which ‘unmeaning’ and enigma release finitude
into its otherness, its boundlessness, this in a dance of thought where-
by matter cannot be contained by appearance, by a logic of pure fi-
niteness. This understanding will become increasingly manifest as
Dezeuze’s graphic work develops and I shall soon give a full treat-
ment of this and especially the Grotesques and Salon noir drawings.
But, in effect, one can safely argue Dezeuze’s sense of the infinite’s
imbrications with the finite right from the outset. To ‘peer through’
painting’s representational illusoriness, as in his 1967 Châssis avec
feuille de plastique tendue, entails a gesture endlessly and varyingly
recycled in works as different as the 1972 Quadrillage, the 1979 Cinq
carrés dont deux vides or the great Cube of 1997 forming, with its
flèches, Per una selva oscura II – whereby the dark, dense and secret
‘forest’ of matter is both evoked as such and, à la Dante, traversed to
reveal a physics beyond manifestness, an hors-limite of the broadest,
unsayable kind (: space, air, light, void, etc.), beyond limit, an immea-
surableness beyond representation. And, I should argue, even works
such as the Réceptacles or the Objets de cueillette, in offering us play,
smile, imagination, freedom of doing and being, are predicated upon a
logic, an aesthetics and a philosophico-psychological sense, of the in-
finite at the very same time as they purport to anchor themselves in
the fundamental ordinariness of the material.
Fifthly, and once more, inevitably intertwined with what pre-

cedes, Dezeuze’s démarche is always drawn to what we may term the
complexity of the simple, a breadth and a depth below the surface. We
could again point to the Cube in Per una selva oscura II or the Gazes
découpées et peintes. And then there are the Extensibles, ever variable
in shape, size, available perspective, colour, this not unlike the ribbon-
like wood veneer Échelles that can be hung vertically or horizontally
or flipped over a couple of times or twisted about into an unrecogniz-
able jumble of a ladder. And all of these works, like so many others
Dezeuze has ingeniously devised – though beyond all desire on his
part to display artistic ‘genius’ – are complexified to a point of impli-
cit infinity as we have seen, via their piercings and aerations, their fre-
quent funky wittiness, and their unspoken meditations on matter’s,
form’s, structure’s, arguable logics and pertinencies. A sixth fascina-
tion, equally everywhere visible, is that with the orchestration of piec-
es into ensembles. Such orchestration may be founded upon principles
of reiteration and modification, mutation of apparent sameness, or else
notions – but emerging from instinct, impulse, not a practice planned
down to its last detail – of alternation and contrast. Thus is it that the
Portes, for example, run through their internal gamut, creating works
that, as Dezeuze understands, ‘are imbricated in musical terms’, just

as the Peintures sur treillis, he equally appreciates, dovetail, but ‘con-
trapuntally” with the Nefs blanches – this moreover not just formally,
but also chromatically, Dezeuze seeing an important level of equiva-
lence in the terms colour and music. Such fascination with the ‘musi-
cal’, rhythmic effect of gathered individual pieces and ensembles con-
fronted either in harmony and relatively manifest consonance or with
a greater polyphonic and even seemingly slightly discordant flair – La
Vie amoureuse des plantes drawings and the sketches of the Forts et
armes ‘series’, or, perhaps, the Nefs works and the Salon noir draw-
ings – such delighted and conscious insistence points, in effect, and
importantly, to a strong sense Dezeuze has of the unfinishedness, in-
deed, the unfinishableness, of art’s production. Despite care, even a
certain meticulousness of execution, Dezeuze does not invest in an
aesthetics of closure and finality. Rather is his doing, his poiein – and
one can see this in his poetry also, that, say, of Dezeuze’s charming
and lively Courtoises frimousses avec fleurs (2006) – predicated on
the flow, the pulsing of gesture, of an action in the moment, not cen-
tred on the prestige of some perfectibility, but the pleasure of the re-
newable, the ever unfolding rhythmics of doing. The exhibition at the
Hôtel de Sully, gathering disparate, heteroclitic works in a newly
‘musicalised’ display of a faire at once old and with wonderful new
accretions (: the large and beautiful collar-like lampshades, for exam-
ple, for the ceiling lights), and, simultaneously, merging such exten-
sive work with the resident art and architecture of the Hôtel in order to
create an even larger symphonisation of doing, of poeticity – we have
here the work of an artist revelling in a ‘music’ known not to possess
transcendent beauty of shape, tone, meaning, but lived for and in the
exhilaration of its deployed rhythmics here and now.
Series (though Dezeuze does not use such a term which he

perhaps feels to be too pretentious for his liking) such as the Objets de
cueillette or the Réceptacles allow us to articulate two further fascina-
tions at the heart of Dezeuze’s oeuvre: on the one hand, a use of the
usual at once to reveal it as such and to demonstrate the intrinsic ‘un-
usualness’ of the usual; on the other hand, and often embedded in such
seen and shown (un)usualness, the attraction of the fanciful, of hu-
mour, irony, wit, of a certain quirkiness that can reach from, I should
argue, even the very early, seemingly utterly serious Toiles ajourées
or Châssis avec feuille de plastique tendue, through the period of the

various Portes and Blocs de bois, to the Grotesques or the poetry and
drawings such as those of the above mentioned Courtoises frimousses
avec fleurs, which also contains the poems of Troubadour de service,
of which the following is characteristic:
Nous dilapidons sans compter

le salaire d’Éros
en caresses sonnantes et trébuchantes.
(Cependant j’en mets un petit lot
dans une tire-lire
qu’on cassera plus tard.)
On se bécote comme on boursicote,
sans penser aux fluctuations.
Pourtant je vois mon amour
très mal coté
et sa courbe descendante
est celle d’un krach annoncé.
Nous sommes rentiers d’amour,
petits porteurs vénusiens:
boursicotons à fond
sur les titres hasardeux
qu’Éros, dans son caprice,
jette à la volée.3
I shall not dwell on the intricacies of these interwoven inclinations

that absorb both the sober attention and the easeful impulses of De-
zeuze’s work. Suffice it to say, firstly, that what we may deem to be
usual to the point of banality, ennui or even invisibility – a picture
frame, canvas, wood, raw matter in general – Dezeuze sees as richly
fascinating and worthy of our intellectual and sensual appreciation, as
well as a fount of potentiality allowing self and matter to interact,
‘know’ and explore one another, discover their infinitely (un)usual
3
Freely translated: We run wild through/Eros’ earnings/ in ringing and stumbling
caresses./(Yet I’m putting a bit in a moneybox/we’ll break open later.)/We smooch
the way we dabble on the market,/not thinking of the ups and downs./Yet I see my
love has dipped in value/and its downward graph forecasts a crash./W are small inves-
tors in love,/Venus’ porters:/let’s dabble away/on risky stocks/that Eros, whimsical-
ly,/casts to the winds.
beingness beyond equations of interpretation and congealed meaning.

Secondly, the wit, the spontaneous whimsicalness that can be sensed
with greater or lesser implicitness in works infused with what already
in 1980 Dezeuze calls a ‘mirthful materialism’ – and of course, the
poem above and others like it, and like, too, many of Dezeuze’s draw-
ings, especially from La Vie amourense des plantes on, demonstrate
that fusion of matter and mysticism, mirth, joy and eroticism that
seems in harmony with the experience of Georges Bataille (again al-
ready evoked explicitly in 1980) – such whimsicalness, then, which
points to Dezeuze’s sense of the deep mystery of all matter, operates
as a lived mechanism, beyond pure theory – releasing us further from
explication into an experience of meaningfulness-without-definition,
an ‘unmeaning’ of urgent being and doing without the pretensions of
absolute knowing or transcendence.
This leads us to my ninth and final observation on certain of

the fascinations at play in Daniel Dezeuze’s work: the linked ques-
tions of the sacred and beingness we have already seen to draw the
attention of the materialist. Javault rightly dwells upon Dezeuze’s ever
growing aesthetic and cultural ‘nomadicism’; Christian Prigent signif-
icantly speaks of the pull of ‘the immense, the equivocal’; and Claude
Minière, in the context of the Grotesques and Le Salon noir drawings,
can go so far as to argue ‘the divine capable of manifest[ing] via a
withdrawal allowing “worlds” to be born and spread forth’. There is
no doubt, moreover, that the graphic work permits ‘worlds’ stranger
than those of the 1967 Châssis or even the Objets de cueillette to
emerge: La Vie amoureuse des plantes of 1992, not unlike the 2006
drawings accompanying the poems of Courtoises frimousses avec
fleurs, offers images essentially anchored by their titles only; their
forms are free, caught in that liberating lack of ‘fear [before] chaos,
the unnamed metamorphoses, the dance of meaning’ – that ‘dance,
dance, dance, dance’ to which Rimbaud’s voyance opened his con-
sciousness and which Dezeuze clearly recognises as central to any au-
thenticity his drawing can hope to generate.4 Whilst I should be in-
clined to see such radical self-liberation as, precisely, permitting
access to an immanent ‘mysticalness’ and ‘sacredness’, gestural, libi-
4
See Rimbaud’s ‘Mauvais sang’, from Une saison en enfer, and my chapter on Rim-
baud in Nineteenth-Century French Poetry (Twayne, New York, 1993).
dinal, contemplative and ‘material’, that Dezeuze is alert to via his

reading of Bataille, Dezeuze himself would seem to draw a distinction
between the drawings of Le Salon noir, which, he feels, does ‘touch
upon the sacred, heresies, gnosticism’, and the various Grotesques
and, presumably, other graphic work such as the Vie amoureuse des
plantes, the Papillons or the ‘Chinese’ works such as the Cascade et
rochers pastel or the coloured chalk work, Deux idoles bouddhiques.
Such preoccupations, beyond the gestural-erotic dimension of art’s
would-be mysticalness, and even sacredness, must also be understood
in relation to Dezeuze’s meditation of art’s ontological status. This, I
should maintain, is central to our further appreciation of the earliest
works where matter and void, presence and absence, weave an indivis-
ible plastic fabric. ‘Before a painting, Daniel Dezeuze will tell Jacques
Beauffet, we see being (substance) but it is in fact non-being that gaz-
es upon us.’ This is not the place to plunge into a full ontological dis-
cussion of such a statement. I must content myself with insisting upon
the yet crucial interpertinencies of 1. Dezeuze’s avowed desire to ‘pre-
serve [in my work] mystical experience without any indebtedness to
some form of transcendence’; 2. his view that void, emptiness, is not
‘inert’, but ‘an active principle’, this not only in purely visual terms,
but implicitly, spiritually, in yet the most open sense of the word: that
which is to do with the beingness of what is seen; 3. this beingness,
equated – most mystically, moreover – with non-being, urges upon us
a profound revision of the nature of matter, ‘support’ and ‘surface’,
that of a physicist-cum-mystic and who sees in his plastic doing the
fullest of epistemological implications.
As I conclude this analysis of an oeuvre whose initial subtle-

ties become increasingly manifest as it unfolds into those related ‘oth-
ers’ that are the richly varied but integrated works of Daniel De-
zeuze’s graphic – and poetic – modes, I should like to offer a number
of necessarily compact remarks on the motivations of his démarche.
The first of these must privilege Dezeuze’s desire to explore the large-
ly neglected significance of matter in the art of painting, but it is an
exploration that, from the outset, overflows any purely aesthetic con-
cerns, understanding the inseparableness of the seen and the unseen,
matter and ‘void’, being and non-being. In many respects, as Christian
Prigent has rightly noted, Dezeuze’s work seeks not so much at all to
produce works – with their implicit prestige and seeming permanence
– as to experience, and meditate and play with, the ‘energy that comes
to us from the unnameable real which [in turn] charges us with return-
ing it to itself’. If early work such as that involved in the Coaraze col-
lective exhibition points to a desire to deconstruct the opposition be-
tween culture and nature, to operate an ‘epistemological rupture’
painting had hitherto refused – and, in sweeter terms, equally De-
zeuze’s, bring a ‘breath of fresh air’ to painting’s stuffy enclave –,
such deconstruction will continue not only through works such as the
Objets de cueillette and Réceptacles, but right into La Vie amoureuse
des plantes and, of course, Grotesques (somewhere between Redon’s
early nightmarish penetrations into his own psyche and work by, say,
Twombly) or the 2006 Échelle avec poids (with its heightened finesse
but, too, its connotations of basic labour and fixing). And, despite the
initial and determined flurry of theory and sociopolitical ideologisa-
tions – and, of course, Daniel Dezeuze remains, like the poet-
philosopher Michel Deguy, disinclined, properly so, to give up think-
ing seriously about his own, and others’, doing5 – Dezeuze seeks ever
to privilege work over theory, the latter, as Pierre Reverdy once re-
marked, needing to come afterwards, not as an intellectualising formu-
la or thesis.
The desire to avoid the formulaic is matched by an instinctive

determination to steer clear of an art of the purely, the avidly formal:
not only does wit and irony abound, but, with them, an easily felt pur-
posing in the direction of the sensual (the 1972 Quadrillage, for ex-
ample), the supple and the subtle (the Gazes, let us say), or the chi-
merical or the mystical-cum-sacred (the Vie amoureuse des plantes
and the Salon noir drawings). Form, by all means, but, too, all that is
in excess of form. In effect, Dezeuze is ever in search of a new seeing:
the 1967 Châssis launches this enterprise whose dimensions never
cease to grow, ever ‘extendable’, ranging from the pseudoconceptual
to the near-visionary (the Toiles ajourées, for example, to the Salon
noir), from the rawness of the visible (the Blocs de bois, say) to a
near-but-not-quite representationality (the Chinese Intérieurs, per-
haps), to the charmingly elusive delicacy of the glimpsed (the Papil-
lons work, for example). And always, in this desire to see afresh, an
5
Deguy has often maintained that art should be accompanied by its own theorisation,
its self-reflexivity.
equal desire to show that each gesture is a renewal, each papillon,

each extensible, each échelle, each grotesque constituting a further
penetration into the seeable – which, yet, is, in consequence, no more
fixable, definitively to be stilled and stated, than it is independant of
the very doing, fatally subjective despite theory’s ‘delyricising’
project, that buoys it up. And it is here where joy and the deep inten-
tion to maintain a fearless art of jubilation enter, determiningly, the
scene of Daniel Dezeuze’s art. And it is here, too, that the seemingly
outside world of matter can be understood to merge – with a fully as-
sumed desire for such a merging – with the self’s endlessly discovera-
ble, and increasingly explored, inner world. A world multiple, no
doubt infinite, enigmatical, and in a sense, as beautifully anonymous,
unnamed, as it is, intensely, inimitably (despite his protests), De-
zeuze’s.
PROLIFERATION, MUTATION,
PHANTASM, THE CEREMONY OF THE
REAL: PHILIPPE FAVIER
‘Sly, generous, limpid and grave’ are the words Catherine

Flohic used in 1986 to speak of the early work of Philippe Favier, and
the man himself, sensing at once the tensions at play in what has be-
come a prolific oeuvre of, largely, miniaturized multitudinousness,
sensing yet equally qualities in the artist and his art allowing a curious
and indulgent warmth to shine through the ‘shadow in the picture’.
Minute figuration, intense detail and crowded surfaces – canvas dis-
appears and yields to paper, glass,, wood, tin and so on – undoubtedly
dominate, but larger works develop over the years, with, for example,
Favier’s Monte Carlo Opera curtain, the 110 square-metre creation for
the esplanade of the U.E.R de Sciences de Saint-Étienne. We can fre-
quently wonder as to the equations drawn between the banal, the
worthless, and the artistic proliferation and stringing together thereof.
But we quickly realize that Favier’s is an art appreciating its own fra-
gility and yet keeping faith with the very elements that may be said to
produce such uncertainty. When we read the artist’s diary entry for
15th December (1994?) in his brief Betty’s (: ‘For lack of practice, the
language of signs falls into disuse: to toss a drawing-room from the
sixth floor today only means “I love you” to me’), we know that we
are dealing with a poet living and toying, at once solemn and tongue-
in-cheek, with the surreal and the poetic in all of their swirling reali-
ties and virtualities. Philippe Favier is the artist offering us Capitaine
Coucou depicted in the midst of his smiling amours as he journeys
forth on his tiny painted tin lid; the artist, too, of the also early 1980’s
mixted technique oil and collage on paper Déjeuclown S. Beckett, with
all that such a tipping of the hat implies; the artist today of the exqui-
site Antiphonium series of ink and watercolour drawings on a set of
old musical scores.1 Louise Ferrari has called Favier a bris-colleur-
écri-peintre, alluding to his ‘puttering about’ with endless bits and
1
See Selected Bibliography. The Galerie Bärtschi also maintains an excellent site
where a good range of Favier’s work can be viewed: www.bartschi.ch.
pieces of the real (and, of course, the mind), his ‘sticking together’ of
multiple, seemingly loosely connected components, his fascination
with and ongoing exploitation of language and sign, all of which con-
stitutes his particular and original mode of a ‘painting’ so often so far
from brush and canvas, from what he felt to be from the outset paint-
ing’s conventional manigances, its classic intrigues or perhaps preten-
tious wire-pulling. Bruno Duborgel suggests that, despite a thematics
– and, in effect, a practice – of exile, solitude, dreamed escape, Favi-
er’s drawings exist in order to ‘act out and write life’, a dailiness ever
‘tatooed with death’. If the evidence for this claim is abundant, from
the early micro battle scenes to the 2001 Abracadavra works, the
2008-9 Meurtre en Saône et Loire series or the most recent Mécanique
des acides (2009-10) acid-on-glass creations, yet will it be important
to recognise the fervour, the perfectionism and the various manners of
intense resistance to any morbidity and tragicalness that, clearly, brush
against Favier’s sensitivity and consciousness before a world in which
sufferings remain legion.
But before examining the complexities of reigning tonalities

and ‘meanings’ in an oeuvre of vast hybridization and what I shall re-
gard as ‘ceremony’ and essentially undecodable allegory, let us turn
immediately to the most strikingly particular material and modal range
that characterizes Philippe Favier’s plastic gesture. The early 1980’s
see the latter veer away from traditional means and very early dab-
blings with photography and a form of Land Art, to embrace, partly
out of financial necessity, partly out of a certain skepticism in regard
to traditional painting, partly out of a preference for intense focusing
of attention – to embrace the rather proletarian and unsanctioned use
of the ballpoint pen and a technique involving detailed drawings cut
out and glued onto paper, and even walls. Champ de choux-fleurs à
Chambourcy (1981) may be said to be a signature work along these
lines, giving us a very small (11 x 22cm) work with its charmingly
undulating field of some 200 or so drawn and cut-out cauliflower ‘fig-
ures’, blazon-like, emblems, perhaps, of the improbableness of their
selection as objects of aesthetic, even ontological, privilege. Paper
supports can give way to tin lids or even the inside ‘floor’ of the con-
tainer – Viallat also took a liking to such available and quirky material
options – which, of course, offer the opportunity to fuse the painterly
gesture with some preexisting industrial markings: Italy-Italie, a 1985
Proliferation, Mutation, Phantasm, the Ceremony of the Real: Philippe Favier 185
drypoint on tin lid is a case at hand, as is the rather bizarre yet utterly
‘ordinary’ numbered series of the Clou (1985), with enamelling on
aluminium paper under glass in the bottom of a small (6 x 17cm) sar-
dine tin, where the image of the nail nestles. Painting, with enamel or
acrylic or ballpoint and, most recently, even photographic work, on or
under glass – such material modes become frequently employed from
the mid-1980’s on, at times involving collaging: the wonderful 1986
pseudo nature morte titled Asperge thus unpretentiously enamels its
tiny vegetable form (11 x 15.5cm) onto glass; the 1991 Madame au
beurre volant, from the Archipel des pacotilles series, conjures its
whimsical implausibleness not simply from its title but also from its
combination of painting on glass and collaging under glass; and the
entire and compellingly strange series, Une ombre au tableau: Oui
Non, presents us with small (30 x30cm) wood-framed works drawn in
ballpoint with pale green acrylic under glass. Frames may become
metal, as with most of the ballpoint, (various) paints and collaging
onto glass works of the 2001 Comment j’ai tué Kissinger series, or
disappear entirely, as with the numerous works, both early and recent,
electing a purely paper support. The latter, however, may mutate from
variously ‘plain’ papers to map paper (: the 2008-9 series, Meurtre en
Saône et Loire, for example), to really old paper (as in the 2009 wa-
tercolour drawings, Écrevisses et architectes), to old engraved paper (:
the 2008-9 watercolour and ink series, Nouveau Roubo).
If it is true that, as Françoise-Claire Prodhon suggests, we can

see in Philippe Favier’s wide range of plastic supports ‘a kind of spiri-
tual errancy’ – and we should not overlook his use of slate, old school
writing slates for children (: the 1995 Suite 668 is the primary exam-
ple, one appealing equally to Joël Kermarrec, as we have seen) or his
use of walls upon which drawn cutouts may be placed –, such an er-
rancy or continuous and spontaneous migration from support to sup-
port (with its potential implications for the tools of drawing and paint-
ing) should not, I would argue, be held to imply an unthinking, pas-
sive and quiescent relationship with the real. Rather does it represent
an openness, an availability, alert to at once material and gestural, aes-
thetic and symbolic values and potentials. Size and number, of course,
are subtly related to such material potentials. The use of ballpoint, en-
graving needles and other pointed implements allows for the devel-
opment of a curious admixture of detailedness, a strangely oneiric
hyperrealism, a concentrated signing, on the one hand, where diminu-

tive images may be set before the peering eye, and, on the other hand,
a frequent multiplication and diversification of such Lilliputian figures
so that the observer’s attention is often pulled in endless directions.
The very early (1981-82) Place Carnot, of already near-postage stamp
size (9 x 12cm), charmingly and poetically maps out in acrylic on pa-
per the hundreds of minute elements pertaining to real place. The 1985
Bébés d’or, of similar proportions (7 x 11cm), paints little acrylic ba-
bies that fly and leap through their cutout paper space impossible to
relate rationally to the pseudo scene unfolding before us with its two
or three other ambiguous figures. Works such Une ombre au tableau:
Oui Non or the many paintings of Comment j’ai tué Kissinger operate
this tension between detailed and miniaturized portrayal and an at
once proliferating and ever hybridizing production of the figures and
signs portrayed. Une ombre au tableau is vertiginous in this regard, its
ballpoint and acrylic forms crowding every corner of the under-glass
works, so that the dizzying visual mathematics of a single painting
increases exponentially as we move to the next and the next and on
again, each detail demanding the eye attend to every shape, every in-
terconnection of adjacent figures, whilst being pulled irresistibly,
though impossibly, to form a larger, ever expanding coherence
beyond, though still in consequence of, the remarkable particularities
and minutiae afforded us. Comment j’ai tué Kissinger may not provide
the busy, the frenetic and swarming figuration of Une ombre, but the
finesse and funky rigour of the ballpoint drawing and, on this occa-
sion, brilliant watercolouring, allied to collaging effects, all in the still
relatively compact ‘boxed’ space (: often 31.5 x 31.5 x 6.5cm) of un-
der-glass works that can been seen from both sides – all of this, plus
names and words thus complicated via this ‘reversibility’ and, as ever,
the serial nature of paintings bearing a full range of intriguing titles,
makes for the familiar and richly and provocatively demanding tug-of-
war between an artistic mode requiring intense focus and one involv-
ing vast and ceaselessly mutating proliferation. Favier himself has
spoken of the ‘discretion’ this endless flow of detailing of the ele-
ments of inner and outer world affords him, and, of course, we should
not overlook the significant role both of the use of what Catherine
Flohic terms the artist’s ‘odd, melancholy and obscure’ titles, and the
serial modalities of his production which ever problematises any ges-
ture seeking to stabilize our grasp of what and how production offers
what it does. Flohic’s preferred example of such titling is the follow-

ing: Anathème pour un crâne mordu – Hahas pour dames-coucous –
et l’espoir ô vaine aigrette-Isite lassée par les airs. ‘Little poetic curt-
seys’, Flavier calls them.
To the implications all such modes and stylings may be said

to generate we shall shortly turn our attention. What we may add at
this point to the above is the fact that such material and modal origi-
nalities as are Favier’s reveal and often confess certain very loose af-
finities with the work of a handful of predecessors and contempora-
ries, whilst undoubtedly marking out a territory of distinct aesthetic
newness which has catapulted his work in thirty or so short years into
a limelight his modest ballpoint beginnings – and continuings – did
not expect to enjoy. Favier himself recognizes the impact of Paul
Klee’s work: I am assuming that the early black and white, pen and
ink pieces, with their superbly detailed draftsmanship, and, too, Klee’s
proclivity for a certain satiricalness and grotesqueness, would have
drawn Favier – as also Klee’s seeking, through colour, for a certain
emotional and spiritual equilibrium, even if no transcendence offers
itself. The work of Christian Boltanski Favier speaks of as having im-
pressed his early years, and again, for Favier is not explicit, one may
feel that the range of commonplace materials used, the pertinence of
memory, a certain humour – one thinks of Le Club Mickey – offsetting
what may be sensed to be an implicit sense of the tragical – that ele-
ments such as these would have motivated a freeness and boldness of
manner in an artist open to new aesthetic and conceptual options. The
work of Marcel Duchamp, too, is unsurprisingly evoked on one occa-
sion by Favier: no doubt for its audacious indifference to established
aesthetic criteria. One may see in Favier’s ballpoint quasidoodlings a
residue of such an attitude – though modesty and unpretentiousness
reign; and one may perhaps argue a lingering effect of the readymade
in Favier’s use of supports such as business cards, musical scores,
even map paper, which interact, not altogether unlike the urinal of
Duchamp’s Fontaine, with the signings, the inscriptions,, the drawings
by which Favier at once appropriates them, ‘charms’ them, and, ironi-
cally, heightens the rich dramas they contain, and which one can so
easily forget or ignore. Favier has spoken equally, if very briefly and
without any elaboration, of the pertinence for his formative years of
Sixteenth-Century art: here, all is surmising: Bruegel perhaps? The
teeming scenes Alkmaar can provide? Cranach? Ghirlandaio? Vicen-

tino’s remarkably intricate and proliferating detailing in, say, The Bat-
tle of Lepanto? One might assume, too, that artists as distinct as
Bosch, with his carnavalesque and often ironic and finely detailed
works, or Henri Michaux, with his personal hieroglyphics – Favier
ever remains not just a poet, nor a constant reader of dictionaries and
encyclopedias (for language and image), but a collector of alphabets
and signs of all sorts – have brushed against the aesthetic conscious-
ness of the artist of Une ombre au tableau, Abracadavra and Antipho-
nium. And, amongst Favier’s contemporaries, though never mentioned
in the occasional interviews over the years, I cannot help thinking –
whilst recognizing great distinctions and originalities – of the rich in-
terpertinencies with the work of a Gérard Garouste or the later produc-
tion of a Martial Raysse: the former’s many Sans titre, both gouaches
and oils, in the superb 1992 Hannover Kunstverein catalogue or the
latter’s Le Soir Antoine!.2
Poet himself – the 2003 Ana, appearing with Fata Morgana, is

a fine example –, Favier’s connections with other poets should be con-
stantly borne in mind. The witty, ironic, ever thoughtful, at once spiri-
tually and melancholically inclined Jules Laforgue figures emblemati-
cally in the inimitable Une ombre au tableau: Oui Non, the following
lines from the Poèmes posthumes divers being quoted:
Éternité! pardon. Je le vois, notre terre

N’est, dans l’universel hosannah des splendeurs,
Qu’un atome où se joue une farce éphémère.3
Laforgue has exerted a wide influence upon modern poetry, and not
just that of T.S.Eliot: poets such as Queneau, with his own ludic pro-
pensities, and, though much less directly, Jacques Roubaud, would
recognize in Laforgue a brilliant manipulator of language and be
urged to push in new directions – Queneau’s Chêne et chien, for ex-
ample, and Roubaud’s various Oulipian adventures – a writing and a
2
Catherine Flohic, in Eighty, actually presents their works together. See earlier chap-
ters for analysis of these works.
3
Translation: Eternity! Forgive me. I see our earth is,/In the universal hosannah of
splendours/But a mere atom on which some fleeting farce is played out.
self-expression avoiding Laforgue’s blatant despondencies, turning his

ironies and derisions away from sentiment towards a more buoyant
wit and linguistic liveliness largely masking any residual sense of
life’s ‘ephemeral farcicalness’. Both Queneau and especially Rou-
baud, with whom significant collaboration has occurred, notably for
the 2001 P.I.L.I project for the Paris metro – both, then, have im-
pacted in important ways upon the modes and manners of the creator
of what, in his excellent essay in numbered fragments, ‘sequentially
restructured upon reflection’, Roubaud calls Favier’s favierogrammes.
Let me give, in conclusion of these truncated remarks on aesthetic af-
finities, the title of Roubaud’s essay: Le concept de ‘chien’ n’aboie
pas. Le chien des Baskerville non plus. It is, of course, a title precisely
and smilingly reminding the reader/viewer of art/literature of that cru-
cial divorce between word or image and reality, the world of things
and phenomena and events, a divorce that disallows and even discou-
rages firm, rationalizing and (inevitably) reductive interpretation and
thereby releases reader/viewer into an unsayableness, a silence, that
yet has its wonders and even improbable upliftments. The poetry of
Francis Ponge Favier has been known to briefly allude to as validating
of his own ‘creative method’, this, I should argue – in the absence of
any real clarification on Favier’s part – for two reasons. Firstly, the
emphasis on things, their intricate specificities and ‘analogical’,
(trans)mutative, ‘differential’ characteristics. Secondly, the under-
standing Le Parti pris des choses and other work by Ponge conveys
of, once again, the gap – both frustrating and liberating – opening up
between ‘the density of things’ and ‘the semantic density of words
[and all images and human signings]’. An understanding that disal-
lows absolute figuration, but, by the same token, allows for the slip-
page from object to obplay, as Ponge writes, and, beyond obplay, a
further movement towards objoy – what Roland Barthes calls ‘the
pleasure of the text’, we may say, and, for Philippe Favier, the plea-
sure, despite all, of text and image. In all of the above, let us remem-
ber that affinities and even occasional admitted influence or strong
likings carry no fixedness or even firm material or modal demonstra-
bleness. Rather we may speak of instinctive recognition and a sharing
of art’s – and being’s – infinite availabilities.
But what, then, are the reigning tonalities of Philippe Favier’s

work, the emotional and psychological energies it generates and
emits? Can it be absolutely maintained, for example, as Catherine

Flohic suggests, speaking of Une ombre au tableau: Oui Non, that all
is antilyrical, beyond sentiment(ality) and elegy, a gesture presumably
having evacuated the self’s sensitivities before the challenges of exis-
tence, giving everything over to some pure skepticism and a poetry,
too, removed from emotional content? A Mallarméan dream of sorts –
though we know well that Un coup de dés is riddled through with the
traces of the ‘shipwreck’ of world and self? What shall we make of
the endless skulls, skeletons, the disarticulated and mutated limbs that
proliferate and hang and float in isolation in their glaucous space, the
breasts and genitals that obsess, the signs of torture and human ‘expe-
rimentation’, the nightmarish horrors everywhere and the handwritten
jottings referencing ‘regret/longing’, untruth, vertigo and so on? With
just an occasional plant or tree as if to jog our memories of other (in-
nocent?) forms of life, of a continuity beyond death. If this is poetry, it
certainly is not ‘pure’ poetry, art for art’s sake: pain, lament, melan-
cholia, anguish seep from every form, every carefully drawn ballpoint
figure. Favier’s signature may be ironic, but it silently weeps. Une
ombre au tableau constitutes his most austere, his grimmest work of
poetry. Jacques Chabot, though speaking largely of L’Archipel des
pacotilles, sees in Favier’s oeuvre an asceticism that denotes ‘spiritual
exercise’: there can be no doubt that Une ombre au tableau: Oui Non
casts the darkest shadow of all over Favier’s painting and that any af-
firmation, any yessing to life, seems pretty well drowned out by its
negation – pretty well, but not quite: art faces up to the demons that
may swarm and multiply, but it persists through the angst and holds its
nerve.
Of course, other tonalities abound, other energies psychologi-

cal and spiritual – in the broadest sense of such terms. Early minia-
tures may reveal battle scenes, but these are consciously childlike, as
playful as they may echo with any somberness, and works such as As-
perge, Champ de choux-fleurs à Chambourcy, or Capitaine Coucou,
and indeed countless others from Suite 668, L’Archipel des pacotilles
or the Épis d’altesse works, offer buoyancy, fun, a quirky and enig-
matic simplicity that, as Favier tells Patrick Bougelet, serve up, he
hopes, an ‘unpretentious but good wine’. Such an art is not one of ar-
tlessness, naiveté, unawareness; Favier confesses – as might we all –
to a fundamental ‘ignorance’, but this is because the gestures, the
forms and images that float into being in, say, the 1993-94 Précis
d’égratignures series of paintings-writings-chalkings on slate boards,
testify wonderfully, and in wonderment, to the obscure forces at work
in all creation, its meticulous ‘scratchings’ being dedicated, moreover,
to ‘Victor’s meccano set’ – and, one surmises, the endless invention
such ‘unsophisticated’ material may spark in the mind of s/he who
opens up to the infinite feasibilities of being and doing. Similarly, an
examination of the 2001 works collectively titled Comment j’ai tué
Kissinger – with component works as varyingly titled as Caravagio,
Rien; Taisez-vous, J.M. Paillard; Courbet, Dieu no.2; Pinochet, Vac-
caro; Général Giap, Hardy – renders clear that Favier’s art is com-
plex, subtle, even urbane, its guile and its beguilingness emanating
from an alliance of quotidian, even strong sociopolitical alertness, and
a free-wheeling oneiric and phantasmagorical inventivity connected to
such alertness. Paintings such as these – and let us not forget that their
images are viewable and only fully appreciable from both sides of the
glass on which they are drawn-painted-collaged – give us rich poetry
of what Favier once called ‘parallaxis’, a poetry ever shifting its ‘posi-
tion’, its ‘perspective’, in relation to the observer, offering simulta-
neously convergent and divergent signings and significations, a semi-
osis and a ‘tonality’ unstable, unanchored – in short, truly free, irre-
ducible – in its very multitudinousness. If we limit ourselves to, simp-
ly, the references generated in the few paintings mentioned above
from the Comment j’ai tué Kissinger ensemble, we see that the (still
largely discreet, despite the flagrant namings: in effect, virtually no
discursive elaboration accompanies the latter) insistencies and tonali-
ties range from those we may associate with great artists, probable
admiration for Vo Nguyen Giap, whose family was tortured and ex-
ecuted during his exile from then Indochina, and who brilliantly de-
fended his country against the long and fruitless and terrible American
invasion of Vietnam, from a seemingly excentric ‘silencing’ of the
maker of pastel paints (J.M. Paillard?), a no doubt grateful nod to Lau-
rel and Hardy and especially the rather hard-done-by and weaker of
the famed comedic pair, and a probably similar acknowledgement of
the prolific author (Frédéric Dard) of the adventures of San Antonio,
to a clear (if, again, quite unelaborated) recognition of all that the Chi-
lean dictator Pinochet wrought upon his people (with Western back-
ing), to, finally, the utterly ambiguous referencings and hence tonali-
ties in throwing out the name of Vaccaro: one of Pinochet’s torturers?
one of the exiled Chilean medical doctors? an investigator into Pino-

chet’s actions? or – for, beneath Vaccaro, we see the word Napoli: -
any one of various important Seventeenth-Century Italian painters,
Andreo? Nicola? Domenico Antonio? Discretion espouses flagrancy,
in effect, in an obscuring and revealing marriage of semiotic point-
ings. Fundamentally all these paintings float out before us virtualities,
multiple potentialities, without any explicit tone – statement of feeling
and thinking before the world – being affirmed. Or, rather, all virtual
tonalities overlap, asserting and erasing themselves simultaneously.
There is seeming encouragement and seeming self-denigration, onto-
logical and aesthetic. Art unveils its teemingness and at the same time
can argue it offers ‘thrice nothingness’. We can sense disgust and an
art reminiscent of Beckettian ‘endgame’, yet winged, implicitly angel-
ic death-riders can mount their phantom steeds, others dance or strut
forth, ever immersed in the swirl of events enigmatic in themselves
and further obscured by the endless free-floating microsigns and
drawings – which Favier deems to be ‘like a supplementary colour, a
fifth season’ – beyond time precisely, an at once oneiric and intuitive
extension-cum-meditation of the real.
A kind of rich mythological figuration is fed to us. But one

without manifest agenda, or, if one prefers, with an agenda that is im-
plicitly infinite, intensely lived, but exploded, éclaté. It is, too, a figu-
ration that, tonally, from the earliest moments of Place Carnot or
Bébés d’or or the wonderful and unusually largish (105 x 105cm),
though infinitely and delicately packed Un rien fait de songes intacts,
du bonheur qui n’aura pas lieu et de mon souffle ici retenu dans la
peur d’une apparition, through to the swarming detail of the 2008-9
ink and watercolour on map paper works of the Meurtre en Saône et
Loire series or the bizarre red crayfish-skeletons painted onto old arc-
hitectural paper designs of the 2009 series Écrevisses et architectes –
a figuration that demands intimacy of exchange, a close viewer atten-
tion to match the meticulousness of the artist’s inscription. Tonally,
over and above any conceivable melancholy or morbidity, we can
sense gestural fervour, an artisanal perfectionism related simulta-
neously to previous craftsmanship (of cartographers, architects, prin-
ters, etc.), to the strange beingness of things that are, and to the equal-
ly strange appeal of the self’s doing in relation to all of this, as in rela-
tion to others with whom such intimacy may be shared. Complex to-
nalities thus emerge from works such as these, or, say, from the 2009
Profils de Simon series of idiosyncratic paintings on old cards show-
ing metal profiles. Daintiness, subtlety and scrupulous refinement vie
with eccentricity, the uncanny or the fanciful. The bodily, the physical
and, implicitly, the sexual are ever placed before us and what I am
calling tone is so often set by the tetralogical, a preoccupation with
corporeal degeneration or anomaly – even though skeletal figures may
continue to creep or walk, climb or push prams, and disconnected
parts can persist in affirming a presence beyond inertness: Une ombre
au tableau may set the standard here, but works such as the strange
yet beautiful 2003-4 black and white glass photography series titled
Céreboscopie or the equally remarkable and tonally tense and para-
doxical Antiphonium, continue to show their allegiance to such com-
plex antiphonal tonal energy. If some may wish to argue that we are
on the cusp of the tragic in Favier, he himself, quite rightly and most
importantly, I would maintain, sees the element of humour – with its
own convoluted modulations – as allowing ‘vigilance’, the tragical
being all too facile an option. To render sadness, in this way, ‘illegi-
ble’, as Favier tells Debailleux in 1994, is to con-fuse tonalities, not in
order, banally, to mystify, but to remain open to the full range of per-
sonal impulse and spiritual rhythm. The ‘reenchantment’ Michel De-
guy speaks of from the centre of his own threnus,4 is clearly an in-
stinctive equilibrating ‘music’ and manner in the gesture and oeuvre
of Philippe Favier. Anxiety does not have to disappear for it to feel the
effects of self’s subversion of it; anymore than humour disintegrates
because tensions resurface. Tonality in Favier is the indefinable no-
place of A folded within Z, the unsituatable space of an energy not
ever limited by condition, conditioning, but ever de- and re-
conditioning itself.5 A tonality developing and exploiting signs that
‘promise to say nothing’, as Philippe Favier tellingly puts it to
Françoise-Claire Prodhon. The hieroglyphics that is his thus never be-
comes clearly translatable. A given series such as Céreboscopie, or
4
See Deguy’s L’Énergie du désespoir (PUF, 1998) and À ce qui n’en finit pas: thrène
(Seuil, 1995). Jean-Claude Pinson’s À Piatigorsk, sur la poésie (Nantes: Cécile De-
faut, 2008) also bears elegantly on the issue of ‘renchantment’ or ‘disenchantment of
disenchantment’.
5
I have always benefitted from Roger Cardinal’s articulation of such matters in refer-
ence to the surreal.
works such like Les Betty’s (1990) or Chemin (1992) which involve
painting or chalking or collaging onto paper or slate, can offer, as in
all Favier’s major series, a vast array of blazons,6 figures, mutations,
letters, words, names public and private, arrowings, labellings, num-
berings and so on, all constituting a swarming, spinning, swirling ton-
al atmosphere beyond all narrative flatness, all linear discursiveness.
Let us examine a little more closely some of the implications

of the appending of Favier’s signature to such profuse and whirling
signings as his plastic gesture ceaselessly lays before us. To place,
frequently, in the very midst of a given painting the self’s initials, PF,
is clearly to situate the self in intimate and inalienable relation simul-
taneously to the ‘inner’, endlessly blazoned plastic world of art and to
the ‘outer’, equally becoming and superabundant and brimming world
from which, rationally and irrationally, intuitively and unconsciously
painting’s ever shifting figurations arise. ‘PF’ is the sign of this recog-
nition and of Favier’s assuming of responsibility for the dual, fused
participation his gestures entail. Bruno Duborgel has spoken of ‘pools
of dreaming, well of selfness’ in the context of Favier’s Archipel des
pacotilles, and indeed the well of world and self, for Philippe Favier,
ever gives and gushes. And, in so gushing, mutates and hybridizes the
images of self to such an extent that Favier himself, fragmented, mul-
tiple, near-infinite, seems to float incognito through his own imagina-
tive universe. And yet, as is evident everywhere – Caravagio, Rien,
for example –, and as Catherine Flohic has emphasized, nothingness
remains, in the midst of this profusion ever welling forth, one of Phi-
lippe Favier’s mantras. It is, however – and it is the very ‘logic’ of pa-
rallaxis, tension, reversibility, multiplicity – a nothingness composed
of and reliant on endless ‘somethings’, a vanitas steeped in both life’s
infinite detail and art’s poetical, transfigurative representation thereof.
A nothingness ceaselessly spewing forth its ‘somethings’ that simulta-
neously confirm and deny the logic of both negation and affirmation,
death and creation. There are painted scenes in the colourful Ether
d’Ambonil series showing skeletal figures traversing inner landscapes,
braving all imaginable conditions; there are ghost-like figures that
skip; skeletons picnic away, dance, make music, hunt, marry, push
6
A term Titus-Carmel is fond of using for its athematic, elastic echoes, its capacity to
speak of pseudo-symbolic obsessiveness.
prams, whether circumstances are pastoral or desertic. And there is the

persistent little red tractor going about its daily tasks. An art sardonic,
ironic, melancholic, perhaps; but filled with the ‘counter-irony’, if I
may express it that way, of an endless doing and coping: life’s, art’s,
self’s.
The works of Philippe Favier may be deemed enigmatic, her-

metical even, but, of course, their uncertainties, their carefully detailed
unknowableness stem from Favier’s refusal of closure, a refusal bear-
ing witness to his own unknowing. Une ombre au tableau: Oui Non
some may feel casts a blatant negatory shadow over positive interpre-
tations of incarnation. But, I should strongly maintain, there is nothing
categoric and absolute in Favier’s plastic gestures. The ‘Yes No’ of
the latter series’ title would indeed seem to cast shadow upon shado-
winess itself. Speaking of Abracadavra, Duborgel argues that ‘being
in the world [equates to and results in an art where dominates] a
beingness in a rebus whose meaning leaks away’. Many of Favier’s
works offer the appearance of a maze, a complex amassing of avenues
or tiny trails of thought and imagination: his use of map paper and
other schematic supports suggests a ground upon which all manner of
articulation and hypothesis may be laid, yet without the latter provid-
ing any conclusive determination of the dramas seen or imagined upon
such a ground. Puzzlement leads to further puzzlement. Meurtre en
Saône et Loire is a kind of blueprint for all reflection on the why of
death, its logic, its ‘origin’, its purpose; but the series does not close
the detective’s inquiry: it is inquiry, provisional, a toying with image,
thought and discreet, almost parenthesized feeling in relation to the
‘violence’, the seemingly dramatic rupture all dying – for the compo-
nent ink and watercolour paintings, many exquisitely, now teemingly,
now sparsely drawn and structured, do not spare us skeletal figuration
– may be said to entail.7 But puzzle remains – all over the map, with
or without map paper. Decipherment is not Favier’s speciality and
thus, to even describe many of his works is a more or less impossible
task: if, still, with Meurtre, painting #1 manifestly defies all coherent
description with its amazingly intricate shattered mosaic of image and
lettering, painting #4, though at first glance a pallid map with just two
7
One could maintain that Meurtre ‘murders’ murder, ‘kills’ death, just as Comment
j’ai tué Kissinger reveals how existential depression can be symbolically overcome.
blue-leaved trees, suddenly brings into focus, as we look more closely

and ‘intimately’, a swarming, proliferating array of ever so lightly in-
ked human and animal forms, ghostlike, half-visible, between pres-
ence and that ever lurking ‘nothingness’ imprinted on Favier’s psyche,
forever tussled with like a dog with a bone.
In a universe, Favier’s here, where the indescribable and the

undecipherable, the discernable and the yet still profoundly puzzling,
prevail, it is fairly certain that the sense of things we may have along
with Favier himself will be polarized, contrastive, binarised, even
though all is gathered, interlocked, synthesized within a single work or
series, and, finally, the entire oeuvre. Take the 1984 Déjeuclown S.
Beckett, for example, which, undoubtedly in appreciation of Beckett’s
own tonal contrasts and energies, offers us a dancing line of tiny fig-
ures with their bouncing balls barely distinguishable from bulbous
heads: we have plunged into at once confusion, beguilement, delusion,
‘unplay’, and (yet) energy deployed regardless of the meaning of
one’s actions, blind continuity. Or there is the 1983 Sans titre showing
two double ranks of primitive warriors, caught not only in the improb-
able but profoundly human incongruities of living and killing, but also
in a portrayal of them not rendering absolutely clear (partly due to the
minuteness of the 75 or so figures depicted) whether the two ranks are
fighting in opposition or together. Incongruity thus becomes a masked
ball of interpertinence. Ambivalence we can fully understand to in-
volve a coupling of inseparables. Play and ‘unravelling of play’
(déjeu) fuse as they are gathered into the interlacement of their appar-
ent and rationalized difference – a difference in effect deferred , con-
structed by the logically categorizing mind, deconstructed by the
mind’s confessed unknowing, its refusal of any easy gnosis. What
ends up reigning in such works, in, too, the recent ink and watercolour
on glass and ink on wood series Vous n’êtes pas d’ici (2007) – each
painting a complex amalgamation of framed micropaintings – and in-
deed throughout Favier’s entire oeuvre with the ever becoming modes
of its unifiedness, is, via this deferral of definableness, conviction and
absolute statement, a form of meaning that offers honest equivocation,
a vacillation that is a recognition of com-pli-cation (a folding together
of A with Z, as I suggested above, of A with all other ‘letters’, alpha-
bets and signings) and, hence, the ceaseless, ever open continuity of
meaning: mean-ing as all that is or might be said or done, made, with

all that is.
To detail, to miniaturise, to – oddly enough – offer definition

of the indefinable, is, in effect, to place art, and the self, at the very
centre of the paradox of all human saying and imaging of the world
and self’s experience of it. Let us think, for a moment, of the Ether
d’Ambonil acrylics, with well over 100 paintings to a series where
each piece presents delicate and often finely drawn and copious detail,
or of the Vous n’êtes pas d’ici where almost every work of the series
is composed of between 10 and 21 small paintings (31.5 x 31.5cm) or
a slight fusing together of a few of these painted squares, and, in addi-
tion, each micropainting provides (very largely) intricately drawn and
interlocking strange white islands of dreamed or lived existence, their
global title raising, of course, the fundamental issue of being, its ‘loca-
tion’, that arguable mystery the poet Heather Dohollau hints at in af-
firming ‘What we are not / What we are not / Is what we are’. Such
proliferation and pseudosynthesis – we never can determine what the
total of the parts actually is – as Philippe Favier’s work produces
could, idly, be thought to be plastically verbose, long-winded, ‘long-
imaged’, as it were: but this would be to misunderstand two important
things: 1. just as Rodin’s entire oeuvre – sculptures, sketches, every-
thing – offers over one million pieces, so Favier’s work is a transcript
of a life’s doing, thinking, poiein, the multitudinousness of its mo-
ments, its impulses, desires, obsessions and so on; 2. such ceaseless
‘crystallisations’ of the self’s relation to the world, as Michel Guérin
calls them, via their simultaneous endless errancy and their generation
of self-contained microscenes, may be said to lead to a form of saying
(of the world) that is synonymous with an unsaying, a non-saying. The
latter, however, we can see not as a denial, but as a continuity of per-
ception and speaking – say-ing in harmony with the unending continu-
ity of meaning, mean-ing, of which I have spoken. In this way, ‘ver-
bosity’ is, equally, taciturn, laconic, succinct, compact. In this way, as
a Gérard Titus-Carmel might argue, silence reigns supreme in the
midst of all that is said and imaged. What I am calling the errancy of
plastic production always therefore contains ‘error’, a deform-
ing/reforming of that ‘truth’ which careful, meticulous application
may have been thought to target. But art as ‘untruth’ is, equally, an
inadequate articulation of Favier’s gesture. Errancy is not so much a
long list of painted errata one after the other, but rather, each time,
and collectively, the artist’s best shot at truth.
But, of course, a truth ever microfictionalised, fabulously

fabled, filled with imagos, the masks of all thinking and articulation of
self and world. Jean Arrouye has suggested that Favier’s is the work
of a moraliste, given his (indulgent rather than vitriolic) exposure of
the elements of existence and art as kitsch, pacotilles – he is thinking,
of course, of L’Archipel, but his argument has generalizing propor-
tions. Whilst one can appreciate this culturally binding view, Favier
remains, to my mind, beyond all reduction, even of this order. All
‘narration’ generated is virtual; all meaning is suspended; unknowing
rules the day and overrules all self-interpretation. Parables remain at
best pseudoparables, allegory ever pseudoallegory. To compare the
work of Philippe Favier with, say, Gérard Garouste’s Kezive ou la
ville mensonge or L’Ânesse et la figue is to realize that, despite the
enigmatic and eccentric openness of such works, their point of depar-
ture is quite particular, admitted, discussed, these works, for Garouste,
being the place of meditation of such particularity. Similarly, though
differences strike us powerfully, the many boîtes of Danièle Perronne
or even her remarkable paintings such as Numéro 1 or Totem, whilst
again not offering fixity of thinking, firm emblematicalness of its im-
ages, nevertheless construct themselves with a certain spiritual and
intellectual impetus her oeuvre seeks to wrestle with beyond all ludic
inclination. Capitaine Coucou, on its sardine tin support and its image
of the smiling sailor lying with his presumed fabled woman-in-port is,
indeed, something of a throwaway image on a castaway’s island.
What does it narrate to us?: nothing we can vouch for, finally, its sub-
text lost with the sardines consumed. No pedagogy can we identify,
unless it is that of the desirability of doing something rather than noth-
ing, even if the something may, as we have seen, be deemed pacotille
and 3 x rien. Une ombre au tableau, for all its skeletons, mummies
and nightmarish mutant forms, plunges us into the silence of its pure
allegorical virtuality. Mécanique des acides (2009-10) may be a series
of self-reflexive ‘commentaries’ on its own fabrication (drawing with
acid on glass), or could it just be evocative of the social protest rap
music of the French group Rage mécanique?: the fine, intricate and
pallid traces left on the black glass surface seem to offer no corrobora-
tion of such feasibilities as they urge us to appreciate other factors and
acidic microjottings finally either barely legible or disappearing into

the infinite vortex of unfathomable, uncongealed blazoned enigma.
And as the Ether d’Ambonil paintings unfold before our wondering
and searching eyes the extraordinary and vast fable of their psychical
errancy, we sense increasingly that, at best, our own questioning mir-
rors that of the artist and that, in the midst of all the showing and im-
aging before us, we yet – profound paradox – experience the strange
‘invisibleness’ of what is seen.8
Certain works from the Comment j’ai tué Kissinger series,

such as Pinochet, Vaccaro or Mao, Moshe Dayan, may indeed be seen
to generate sociopolitical fervour, and indeed have done so with cer-
tain viewers; but to examine the full detail of such paintings, and es-
pecially the many others of the collection, is to realize Favier’s art is
in a rare and free mode of non-commitment, of deflation of discourse
rather than its inflation, of (self-)liberation from ideational fixity ra-
ther than attachment to the ceaseless flow of ideas that pass through
the mind – but are not an integral part of our deeper being, obscure
though it may be. It is no wonder, then, that the art of Philippe Favier
does not seek to distinguish in any radical way between reality and
fiction: we know no more what the real is, the purpose and meaning of
its multitudinous and hypercontrastive nature and eventuation, than
we know why and how our thoughts, our phantasms, our dreams de-
velop, what they represent in relation to our being and what we perce-
ive to be the real. The small wood and collage painting on glass of
1992, L’Oeil, utterly enigmatic with its faint, half erased scribblings,
its tiny centrally featured, cocooned yet shrivelled childlike form rec-
lining against, perhaps, a rock, its potted (artificial? – of course artifi-
cial!) tree, a golden ring floating free – L’Oeil seems the perfect emb-
lem of sight’s capacity, not to see absolutely, but only to create a
seenness according to profound relativities, swirling intuitions,
wondrous if ever groping sensitivities. Such seenness/unseenness can
reveal itself in one-off creations such as L’Oeil. This, however, as we
know, is not Philippe Favier’s favoured manner of fabrication, al-
though, of course, it inserts itself into what, in conclusion, I shall call
the unending parade and ceremony which his art inscribes. The series
is, as we have seen, the ideal structure enabling such (self-) explorato-
8
Éric Chevillard sees here a visibility that offers no ‘key’ as to what is seeable.
ry performativity and theatre to deploy itself. So is it that L’Archipel

des pacotilles strings together the fragments of such exploration of
self and world; so is it that the works of Comment j’ai tué Kissinger
bring together, circus-like, the brightly painted and costumed ‘acts’ of
Pergolese, Laurel and Hardy, Gandhi, Fra Angelico, Darry Cowl, Me-
lina Mercouri, Steve MacQueen, Pascal, Dieu, Xenakis and so much
else: they circle their brief arena, flash the myriad glitter of their mo-
ment upon the stage of the mind, never cohering any more than the
sight of a hundred people or phenomena glimpsed as we walk through
a crowded street can grasp anything other than the astonishing and
richly diverse, inconsistent, hybrid, ever mutating patterns of their pa-
rading by us – as we parade by them. Nouveau Roubo (2008-9), an
ever finely drawn ink and watercolour series on old engraved cards
depicting designs for wooden structures, constitutes a moving, serial
place of such ceremonial yet ludic performativity. Skeletal forms of
all sizes, along with the occasional dog, leopard or polar bear, swing,
slide, hang, climb, inspect or simply loll about, everywhere crowding
the architectural space of the engravings. Individually and collective-
ly, Favier’s works roll out a pageant of mortal human doing, a theoria
– a procession-process-proceeding, without theorization – as seriously
and focussedly ritualistic as it is consciously whimsical, quizzical,
droll. Works like Antiphonium, Profils de Simon, Meurtre en Saône et
Loire, for example, also, truly are what Bonnaval has termed ‘palimp-
sests [of] unsayable emotion surging forth’. They are predicated on a
fusion of system and capriciousness, the ordered and the orgiastic, the
experience of the real and a ceremonialising toying with its deeply un-
fathomable, at once exhilarating and disturbing, abundance – which
can yet be lived as absence. Ana is the title of a short book of poems
Philippe Favier published in 2003. Ana: collection of notes, wittic-
isms, etc., pertaining to one’s life? Ana: name of ‘She who far from
here in the other black river where it is always late’?9 Ana disallows in
countless ways a settling of the very unsettlingness its poetry gene-
rates. ‘Je vague, Favier writes:
Je vague, je connote et me perds;

j’accoste où il manque la terre
et il manque la terre.
9
This text is given in red and interspersed with the black texts of the (other) poems.
Une rivière à deux bras m’apporte

des on-dit.
Je rebrousse et m’appelle et loin

je m’articule, je m’écorce me plante,
m’attelle et m’inouis.
Dans le vacarme de ces chants

d’oiseaux, à la rescousse de
personne, je me fais ce que la
la solitude.10
PhilIppe Favier’s art: an art of the self’s solitary rite of pas-

sage towards a dreamed, half-smiling and most mortal intimacy. Nou-
veau Roubo and Antiphonium continue today to achieve such an inti-
macy-beyond-salvation, whose other name is poetry. Or ballpoint
painting. A poiein, an articulation, where astonishment drowns out
hearsay, where ceremony of being and doing tussle ceaselessly with
what would deny them.
10
My translation: I wander, I connote and am lost;/I draw close to where no land
is/and no land is.//I backtrack and call out to myself and far away/I find articulation,
shed my husks, plant myself down/go to it and astonish myself beyond belief//In the
din of bird-/song, saving/no one, I become what/solitude.
THE ART OF WAR AND PEACE:
DANIEL NADAUD
In passing from the work of Philippe Favier to that of the final

artist I have the opportunity to give thought to in this book, it is
worthwhile reflecting upon the relative constancies of artistic produc-
tion as well as the endless shiftings and revampings such continuities
involve. Gone, in the work of Daniel Nadaud,1 is the use of ballpoint
and ink; yet pencil remains an essential means, as does the print of
small edition books. Gone, the obsessive use of recycled supports –
tins, lids, cards, maps and the like; yet recycling remains a powerfully
centrally figuring component in Nadaud. Gone is Favier’s teeming
microscopic detailing, though Nadaud’s gesture ever retains a fine me-
ticulousness and orchestration. Gone, too, those series of which Favier
is enamoured for the opportunity they offer to work through to ‘ex-
haustion’ a particular modeling of compulsive consciousness, this
moreover in fine counterpoint to the ‘thematics’ of recycled, already
serried supports;2 yet, in Nadaud, there remains the pursuit of particu-
lar aims with a variety of interrelated materials and preoccupations –
whereby seriality moults into simple interconnectedness. Gone, equal-
ly, after Nadaud’s intitial work exhibited in 1974 at the Galerie Du-
rand in Paris, is Favier’s continuing commitment to painting; ever yet
remain, however, richly original, foundational, yet seemingly oddly
throwaway – never acknowledged as essentially conjoined with the
emerging sculpture/object – the act of drawing, a constant ‘memory’
of painting’s depth of purpose and hope, and those colouring albums
that Nadaud has created on the basis of his own unusual, if modest,
almost self-effacing graphic vision. Gone, finally – I shall stop here,
though interpenetration and transformation assume many other forms
–, that special Favierian fascination with alphabets, words, signs, sig-
nature; yet does Nadaud’s strong sense of the power of language re-
veal itself in his titles, his delight in book ‘illustration’ and fabrication,
1
See Selected Bibliography. A personal website will be of use: www.danielnad-
aud.com.
2
The idea of ‘self-exhausting work’ is also significant in the thinking of Gérard Titus-
Carmel: see my chapter in Contemporary French Art 1.
as well as his noticeable attention to the anchoring and referencing of

the plastic.
Let us take a look at a few works to obtain an initial sense of

the originalities of Daniel Nadaud’s plastic gesture. Contorsion, for
example, or, say, Lance-pique, both of the 1987-88 period, hesitate
between object and sculpture. Both, despite their complex fabrication
– steel, bronze, copper combine with the use of wood, pvc, stone and a
little paint – and their somewhat precariously towering size (180cm
and 175cm, respectively), contrive yet to offer standing sculp-
tures/objects, exquisitely and improbably balancing on the tiniest of
bases. Both works are at once elegant, graceful, and quirkily enigmat-
ic, ludic. They merge the energies of care, precision, justesse, and the
phantasmagorical, the spontaneously intuitive, a pure indifference to
applied and rationalisable purpose. Contorsion and Lance-pique may
be seen to ride a line between the surreal, with its pseudoagendas of
dream, the unconscious, the unavowed, the antirational, the ‘morally’
liberated, and the residual lure of an aesthetics that Breton would have
us believe surreality eschews in its preferred and deep fascination with
‘the real functioning of the mind’. Both pieces suggest the tensions of
the claims of phantasm, impulsiveness, mental disponibilité, on the
one hand, and, on the other, harmony, equilibrium, fragile and me-
naced – even menacing (with their sharp, pointed, potentially piercing
pinnacles) – though they may be: their respective titles hint, perhaps
playfully, perhaps with more painfully ironic subtexts, at life’s and
art’s complex realities: the ‘twisting’, de-/re-forming of plastic crea-
tion; but, too, existence’s ever possible ‘knottedness’, its disfigurings
and its aggressions – preoccupations Nadaud will not entirely shake
loose in the years to come. The 1995 Coin du pêcheur goes some way
towards what Michel Deguy has termed the imaginable ‘reenchant-
ment’ of our being-in-the-world, taking art outside, into a ‘secret gar-
den’ and offering a semi-circle of long red arching fibreglass fishing
rods whose lines converge and are hooked to an object buried in the
lawn.3 The overall effect is one of airiness and slenderness, a finesse
yet earthy in its evocation of rural recreation and a gracefulness in
harmony with that of thoughtfully tended gardens. The object to
which the eighteen fish hooks are attached, however, turns out to be
3
The work is subtitled Jardin secret 1.
The Art of War and Peace: Daniel Nadaud 205
an empty Second World War shell case, lodged in an earth that saw
such bombs rain down upon it. Aesthetic transcendence, certainly,
charm, daintiness even; but, too, an unspoken, uncommented trace of
the violences, the un-beauty of only fifty years prior to the making of
this Coin du pêcheur in a now quiet haven.
In the mid- to late 1990’s Daniel Nadaud begins to offer us

works drawing upon his increasing consciousness of the tensions the
rural France of Mayenne he now inhabits may be said to represent and
live. The 1999 Fin des Gaules is a perfect case in point. It is worth
quoting Nadaud’s own detailed description of the piece as finally
‘sculpted’ (and also frequently drawn): ‘A domestic type of cart, one
of whose wheels having especially suffered and been patched up / a
carpenter’s axe tied onto a red arm of a horse cart / a particularly sharp
hook hafted into a dead pear-tree branch / a triangulate construction of
undressed wooden supports treated with carbonyl, a sickening smell /
six delightful wooden school set squares / five bamboo fishing rods,
one being very light, made of composite materials / (presented for the
first time in the Chapelle du Genêteil, in the Château Gontier, Jan-
Feb-Mar 1999)’. Raw or found, ‘gleaned’ materials are thus recycled,
collaged together, as it were, but with scrupulous consideration typi-
cally given to their assembly. The ordinary, everyday elements of
working rural life are yet not left to reveal the simplicity of the latter,
but are pulled out of their comfort zone into a place of unease, a mode
of being of the unheimlich. For Nadaud’s Fin des Gaules is not pure
play. Its axe and its protruding hook make of a farm cart a chariot of
war, admittedly smallish (28 x30 x 480cm) as war engines go, but not
to be handed over to the children. Domesticity thus weds aggressivity,
safety melds with danger. And, of course, the title, though witty –
‘The End of the Gauls’, but, too, the end, the final state, of long thin
poles, switches, fishing rods – yet cannot mask that elegiacal tone, that
tonality of loss and endgame (as Beckett might say) investing much of
the work of this period. As with the bomb shell of the Coin du
pêcheur, La Fin des Gaules manifestly roots itself in the realities of
the twentieth-century wars fought on French soil, wars marking a vio-
lent end to (supposed, mythical) rustic and agricultural serenity and
harmony. An end, forever, perhaps, to the old Gallic France as we
knew it or dreamed it. This said, however, a work such as the 2003
Oraison-cloche, installed in the Collège Marcel Duchamp, Château-
roux, may be said to offset the somewhat sobering effects and man-
ners of La Fin des Gaules. Its one hundred steel bells, reminiscent ar-
guably, seen in a rural context, of those adorning the necks of farm
cows and goats, plus its twenty berceuses of similar cultural reson-
ance, all hanging from a high ceiling, delicate, unassuming, beautiful
in the purity of their orchestrated gatheredness – such a massed, sym-
phonic creation clearly reveals an ever maturing and complex con-
sciousness on the part of Nadaud not just of sociopolitical factors long
at play in the region of Europe in which he resides, but also of art’s
modal and material richness, ever open to new thinking, new deploy-
ment.
In effect, the manners and materials explored by Daniel Na-

daud show what Claude Minière has termed, and this as early as 1986,
‘iconic freedom and technical diversity’. Woods and metals of all
kinds, ceramics, rubber, glass fibre, bone and horn, found objects or
parts thereof, pen, pencil, paper, plexiglass, rope and string, stone,
paint: implicitly infinite is the matter out of which Nadaud seeks to
fashion the objects/sculptures rearing up from a fertile imagination
both grounded in experience and ever reconceiving its pertinence and
potential. That Nadaud himself alludes to the heteroclitic impact upon
his sensibility of artists such as Redon, Arcimboldo and Fahlström
confirms the impression we have of distinctly diverse affinities: if Na-
daud does not give himself modally to what Redon’s Les Yeux clos or
his Sommeil de Caliban represent, we can surely sense throughout his
oeuvre the working and mulling over of the unconscious, a dipping
into the power, at once light-filled or darker-toned, of matter’s un-
bridled symbolics. Arcimboldo, famed for his ‘portraits’ of the sea-
sons, his ingenious fusion of subject and object, the human and the
matter of human fascination, in paintings such as Jurist or Vegetable
Gardener, once again seems modally remote from Nadaud’s plastic
gesture, except that he too is ever at work fusing, compositing, doing
and thinking at least two things at the same time. As for Fahlström, his
own diversity matching that of Nadaud, one could naturally point in
particular to the wonderful and yet quirky suspended sculptures to
which he has given himself. Such affinities, I stress, are only ellipti-
cally perceptible, just as those we might seek to track down in exami-
nation of, say, Barry Flanagan’s fanciful Hare and Bell or Drummer,
or, again, Tatiana Trouvé’s enigmatic sculptures/objects Absorption or
Rock – work, artists, of which Nadaud equally and understandably,

can speak in appreciation of the energy they incarnate and the funky,
improbable gracefulness they generate. Looking more freely, beyond
Nadaud’s own indications, we could point to echoes of Miró and the
surrealist phase of Giacometti’s creativity in the early sculp-
tures/objects such as Contorsion, the 1993 Mobile féroce, or again the
witty and charming Sans tambour ni trompette. The finesse and grace-
fulness, along with the darker reminders of human folly, in sculptures
by Bernard Pagès such as La Dépenaillée or Le Dévers aux falbalas
and his Pal aux vis or the Pal aux anneaux, these too would surely
enter the consciousness of a Nadaud capable of giving us exquisitely
though differently harmonious balancing acts such as that offered in
L’Ancêtre a la peau dure (with its tall branch anchored in the smallest
of metal bases and its slim, phantasmagorical wire and thorny upper
pseudobranchings demanding the most delicate of engineered equili-
briums) or the numerous drawings of half-real, half-satirically fanta-
sized pistols and other alarming (pseudo)weaponry of his colouring
books awaiting the accompanying gesture of the maturing child. Such
tensions and hybrid modalities as may be on display in Annette Mes-
sager’s Les Piques, for example, no doubt have impacted loosely the
imagination of Nadaud, and no doubt the ghosts of Schwitters, Picasso
and Duchamp inhabit a corner of the mind of that arch bricoleur, re-
cycler and genial inventor that is Nadaud. And, of course, the personal
notes drafted in the early 1970’s reveal the distinct pertinence of
Claude Viallat’s work and liberal theorizing in Nadaud’s formative
period as he becomes aware, not just of the materials, the supports and
‘sur-supports’ of plasticity, not just of the effect of the ‘final spec-
tacle’ of art, but of the fact that, for the artist, work is ‘creative work
itself, constituting [art] apart from its final spectacle, [which is] deci-
dedly secondary’.4 We shall have occasion to examine further notions
such as this. Suffice it to say here that, from the outset, Nadaud’s con-
nection to other artists and art forms is at once a deeply thinking one
and goes far beyond questions of aesthetics into the realm of an ontol-
ogy conceived in the broadest of terms. Whether the final plastic
product is placed in the space of gallery, museum, barn, chapel, or
outdoors where the wind, sound, play of natural light, the infinite mul-
4
The copies I have from Daniel Nadaud reveal no publication details, nor have I un-
earthed any to date.
tiplication of sur-support and, thus, mise en scène generate ceaseless

shifts in the viewer’s sense of the relation of art to world, to what
Bonnefoy has called ‘presence’, it remains that, for Nadaud, art’s
agenda is not folded back upon its formal, decorative, stylistic pres-
tige, but, rather, endlessly open to meanings at once obscure and lu-
minous to do with one’s being-in-the-world and one’s doing, one’s
action and meditation in relation to this beingness.
‘Tension, elasticity, the very form of combination’, Daniel

Nadaud writes, elliptically, in his 1972 personal musings under the
heading Viallat. But, while we can think through such jottings in
terms of the visible anatomy of art’s surface design and orchestration,
the stress and ease that characterize the shape and colour of art’s struc-
turings and combinatory effects, it is important to appreciate equally
the pertinence of such language as applied, beyond sheer surface and
architectonic relationships, to the implicit discourse of being that may
– and, I should strongly argue in the context of Nadaud’s oeuvre and
conceptualizing thereof, does – accompany, complete and deepen and
give ethical and spiritual meaning to a forme that, without such a fond,
would remain an empty shell, a visibleness with no vision. Works
such as the 1999 Paradis heureusement perdu (with its plant imprint-
ings, with paint and drawing thick-glued onto wood and a white cobra
skin) or the 1999 Corde destininée à refaire l’histoire et fourche pour
la ramasser (with similar elements of fabrication, plus rope, hook, and
three-pronged pitchfork) or, again, the equally pointedly titled Non…
(2000) (with, again, similar creative means, plus a school ruler) – all
such works reveal an artist extremely and simultaneously conscious of
the delicacy of visual configuration and the deeper purposing under-
pinning and, as it were, authenticating, validating and ontologically
rooting such configuration. The grace of the 1989 L’Enfance de l’art
cannot fail to strike us, its solid and rounded wooden base sprouting
the finest arching steel wire crescent with its two pieces of bone mod-
ulating the funky, slightly dislocated curvature. Such a sensitivity to
line and volume and material texture show an artist at the height of an
instinctive aesthetic consciousness that can be seen in so many plastic
modes: one could point, for example, to the large (160 x 120 x 270cm)
Porte-lignes (d’intérieur) with its long fibre glass rods curving far
away from their two-panel fanned wooden base, itself tilted and anc-
hored by the feet of two of the five rods which, improbably, support
one huge set of stag antlers; or, form ever pursuing its quest for new
subtlety, a new ‘truth’ of beauty, the delightfully delicate 2000 instal-
lation of Maison mère (troupeau) in the Parc de la Courneuve, with its
pale green fishing nets hung along with 150 cattle-bells some sixteen
or seventeen feet high above the ground amongst the garden’s tall
trees.
Valabrègue has spoken of Nadaud’s ‘balancing acts sought in

extremis’, and it is true that there is so frequently, in the very midst of
a harmony and a poise that offer adornment, elegance and charm, a
residual sense, less of architectonic precariousness than of a fragility
metaphorical, essentially existential. Whilst this tension uniting grace
and a degree of edginess, even rawness, an anxious querying of hu-
man doing and being, is not always manifestly at play, as it is with
Porte-lignes and L’Enfance de l’art, which speak implicitly of death (:
bone, antlers), we should not overlook the fact that art’s own delicacy,
its intricate and intimate private gesture, clearly constitutes a pheno-
menon of the utmost brittleness and frailty when set against the domi-
nant criteria and modes of being and doing of the day – indeed, any
day. Maison mère (troupeau) powerfully yet silently exemplifies this
as it raises aloft the elements of its beauty in a world paying only mar-
ginal attention to such poetry. The disparateness of art’s grace is cer-
tainly most visible with Nadaud’s creations: wit and irony in their
titles may seem to detract from a ‘seductiveness’ thus undermined
and, perhaps, as Patricia Brignone writes, ‘illusory’; a certain tender-
ness we may feel is attached to Nadaud’s caressing of agricultural
life’s hard-won dignity finds itself locked together with more ‘acidic’
and ‘darker’ tonalities, as with La Fin des Gaules, or other works such
as the 1997 Naufrage or the 1993 Oisiveté tranchante with its ‘idle’
but ‘cutting’ assembly of wood, horn, hammer handles; the inventive,
lyrical structuring of works like Tête-pelle (1996) or the complex en-
semble of La Gricole (1996) is countered, as so often, by that poetics
of unspoken hazardousness, perilousness as well as the material raw-
ness and brokenness they may display. Grace, here, is never pure. It
seems like a lost paradise at best, a dream. Les Attributs de
l’Assomption (1994) toys with this notion, giving us the impossible
elements (two small steel wheels and a wooden ladder going nowhere
too evident, both pieces bound to a round compressed wood piece) of
an elevation purely theoretical: spiritual ascension become material,
grounded, plunged into minimality and humour. The relatively small

(114 x 70 x 15cm) 1993-94 Fallacieux méandres, on the one hand a
charmingly sinuous creation of curling wood, tin and leather, belies its
grace via its pure ‘fallaciousness’, its perhaps self-consciously idle,
toying self-indulgence in a world conceivably perceived as at once
more serious, even if absurd. L’Entrave (1994), similarly, though we
may view it as a boldly raw but still graciously harmonized melding of
wooden billiard table legs, rough-hewn fir planks, large tractor tire
(‘worn and smelly’), an old, ‘tired’ saw blade and patched-up bread
shovel, yet the ingenious beauty and witty, improbable comeliness of
its assembly are dashed, ironised and literally presented as collapsed,
broken, crushed under their own significant weight and size (160 x 70
x 590cm). Grace and charm, simplicity and inventiveness, indeed art
itself, at the very moment of their self-affirmation, come up against
‘hindrance’, ‘obstruction’, ‘constraint’, ‘blockage’. Art’s entrave
placed alongside, indeed fusing with, the many entraves of everyday
existence. Implicitly.
The art of Daniel Nadaud, as we will have grasped, is equally,

and importantly, an art of recycling. To reuse bits of wire, furniture,
bone, rope, netting, bells, tires, farm implements and so on, is to en-
gage in a modeling and a constant remodulation of the endless bits of
the real, of the earth, of things at hand. Nadaud is not an ecologist in
any normal sense of the term; rather is he a philosopher, a philoso-
pher-poet of the symbolic depth of what is, the things that are, and
what can be done with pieces, fragments, the discardedness, the bro-
kenness or ‘exhaustedness’ of our being. Such an art and arguable eth-
ics of recycling involves the taking up of the fatigued and the col-
lapsed and offering various forms of reinvigoration, patching and re-
newal, whether it involves the rough remodeling of, say, La Fin des
Gaules or L’Entrave, the wittier, if often conceptually tensional recon-
struction of the early sculptures/objects such as Lance-pique or the
1989 Aliment louche (with it seamless elegant bonding of wood base,
branch-like column, its snaking wooden excrescences, nail and tin
ladle with egg-like shell), or, again, the redeployment of old cattle-
bells amongst other items such as fishnets, themselves given new life
and pertinence. Recycling, too, in addition to bringing about, via such
grafting and ‘propagation’, as Valabrègue has called it, something of
an imagined reunification of what we may regard as irreconcilably
distinct, divided, also may be said to recuperate the forgotten, trans-

forming oblivion into memorialisation – as in, say, Nadaud’s Tétralo-
gie laborieuse (which gathers together various individual pieces such
as L’Entrave, La Gricole, Nerf des Der [with its oak barrel stand, two
metal arms, sharp pitchforks, large laurel branch, substantial hemp
netting, etc.] and other pieces), and which, as is generally a principle
with Nadaud’s work, manifestly or implicitly sings the labour and
rough creativity of farm workers, traditionally dear to a land and a
people now, as elsewhere via the exodus to cities and depersonalizing
industrialization of agricultural life, less sensitive to what such life has
represented.
Recycling shifts, transmutes in the midst of its reminiscence,

its often odd mixture of honouring and smiling or more fervent irony.
Disaffectedness, indifference – the offshoots of discarding and aban-
donment – thus, with Nadaud, are countered by what he calls an ‘af-
fectivity’ he finds it difficult, and no doubt undesirable, to avoid. To
look, not simply at works such as those of the Tétralogie laborieuse,
but, too, at the drawings of Liquider, with its moving text by Bernard
Lamarche-Vadel accompanying hybridized and entangled guns, phan-
tasmagorical war weaponry cobbled together out of farm and domestic
materials, menacing and nightmarish machines and objects poised to
lacerate, explode, murder – to gaze upon such multiple works (: the
drawings are numerous) is to plunge, now more subtly, now more fla-
grantly, into what a 2007 work combining Bernard Noël’s texts and
many more astonishing drawings terms ‘delicate disaster’.5 Thus, yet,
is it that even intense anguish, terror, horror are recycled into play,
humour, the caress art may afford the most disturbing of experiences
or thoughts, a caress whereby the malevolent and the barbaric, whilst
far from being forgotten, nevertheless achieve a kind of distillation
whereby finesse, grace, something perhaps of an indulgence, a forgiv-
ing compassion may be salvaged, whereby some light, some enligh-
tenment may shine.
Obsession with what Nadaud calls the ‘remainders of a

wrecked universe’ can thus be seen to entail no congealment, no static
psychology or ontology, nor any fixity of plastic manner. What I have
5
See infra for a full discussion of this key collaboration.
termed recycling is a dynamic process, an art of gathering up of what

is and its transformation, even what we may think of as its transfigura-
tion. For the poetics of recycling is in many respects that of metapho-
risation (: ie a ‘carrying-over’), symbolization (: a ‘throwing togeth-
er’), processes whereby – and Nadaud tells us that ‘metaphor consti-
tutes my preferred tool’6 – A (old bells and netting, for example, as in
Maison mère (troupeau)) + B (the trees of the Parc de la Courneuve
and the wind blowing, etc.) becomes what Stéphane Mallarmé called
that ‘third element, fusible and bright’, ie not just a sum of the parts of
A and B, but a new object or phenomenon, a ‘place’ of being-in-the-
world not truly situatable or even describable. This ‘throwing-
together’ of component elements remodels being, produces a newness
that, playfully, reflecting the interplay of A and B and their trans-
figuration (: their figuration crossing over in both [or all: components
may be numerous] directions, senses (sens), can often find its home in
Nadaud’ titles: L’Heure du thé, for example, with its two rounded
wooden ‘trays’, one half folded upwards and propped by a turned leg,
and an old leash meandering from ‘tray’ to ‘tray’, or La Gricole (with
its play on words and matter), or, as we have seen, La Fin des Gaules.
If A and B contain autoreferencing (wood=wood, tin=tin, goat
bells=goat bells, etc.) and if it is abundantly clear that Nadaud’s fun-
kiest or most enigmatic work – L’Eau régale (1991-95), perhaps, to
which I shall return – grounds itself in the real and our conceptualiza-
tion of it, it remains that, as Bernard Noël has noted, what Nadaud’s
genius involves is presenting us with ‘fictional things having the so-
lidness of the real’. Recycling: the creation of fiction, of ‘narratives of
assembly’, as Frédéric Valabrègue writes, the fabrication of new
truths, ‘carried-over’ and ‘thrown-together’ from the scraps of a real
so often cast aside, unthought, unsung, that, yet, for some, have deep,
moving pertinence with a full gamut of emotions and meaning at play.
Can we, at this point of our consideration of the considerable

oeuvre of Daniel Nadaud, reach towards a clearer picture of the pur-
pose and the why of his doing, his poiein? I offer, here, ten compact
remarks:
6
Cyroulnik argues against this metaphorical dimension, though settling for a poetics
that changes and disturbs meanings.
1: art, for Nadaud, is instinctively constructive, it raises up (:

struere) with: with the elements of our consciousness of the
world and our being: such ‘con-struction’ is the primary visce-
rally motivating factor: it heeds the drive to do, to make, to
add to what is, and, in this, eludes ‘despair’ which may thus
be seen as a surrendering to non-doing and a stagnation of be-
ing;7
2: art involves ‘dreaming’ and the ‘seeing’ of Rimbaud’s

voyant: in that, though founded upon materiality, the teeming
thereness of matter, art purposes and ‘means’ beyond the lat-
ter, transmuting it into Reverdy’s antinature with what Na-
daud recognizes as its temptations urging the artist’s staying
in the haven, the refuge, the non-place or unspace of art – as
Nadaud writes, with a smile, we fancy, there is ever the
chance that ‘the artist drowns in La Gricole’, the indefinable
space/unspace of art’s ‘fabulation’ that, yet, as Nadaud fully
understands, entails ‘self-exhibition’, an exposure of the self
that nevertheless does not equate with autobiography as we
generally conceive it, but is perhaps akin to that generation of
‘autofictional fragments’ of which Alain Robbe-Grillet has
spoken and whereby subjectivity creates its others;8
3: art’s purposing may frequently rest upon a sense of ‘stifle-

ment’ and ‘bewilderment’ that yet propels doing and making,
dragging these emotions along, though trans-figuring them:
such a movement of psychological and affective energy may,
moreover, push art into what Nadaud calls ‘error’, even some-
thing like disaster – ‘the artist can capsize’, he notes – and,
beyond perhaps allusions here to works which Nadaud titles
Naufrage and Premier naufrage, we may see here, simulta-
neously, a metaphor for the artist being viscerally caught up in
the collapse, the ruin, the ‘death’ that Nadaud sees in the
countryside’s ‘immense cemetery’, and even civilization more
broadly, and thus, perhaps, a metaphor for, despite its ‘con-
7
For a good deal of what I am arguing here, see Nadaud’s text L’artiste construit….
8
See Robbe-Grillet’s excellent Romanesques trilogy (Minuit, 1984-1994).
structive’ doing, art’s failure, its relativity, its incapacity to

achieve fabulations of adequate transformational ontic power;
4: passion, ‘burning’ yet drive art: they may not be the pur-
pose proper of artistic activity, but they are the engines of its
‘divine illusions’, terms which, of course, suggest clearly the
tensions at the heart of Nadaud’s work and confronting-
opposing-unifying high ideality and elevation on the one
hand, and, on the other, that doubting of the latter’s validity
we have just seen;
5: if Philippe Cyroulnik argues against the notion of a poetics

of elevation, beauty and marvellousness in Nadaud’s work, it
is no doubt because he sees therein a hauntedness, a sense of
the nightmarish that disturbs the equation too much; and it is
true, Nadaud will affirm it in L’Artiste construit… and else-
where – most recently in a postface to the 2007 Délicat désa-
stre – art’s purposing, its orientation, may conceivably in-
volve ‘violen[ce], indeed aggress[ion]’, even ‘unshakeable
rage’, emotions that may have ‘political’ implications even if
art’s design is not to develop them in systematized and ration-
ally overt fashion, but, rather, opts for obliqueness and a per-
tinence that, whilst emerging from history, yet ‘has no hour’,
no temporal limitedness, being ever in excess of its specifici-
ties;
6: the latter specificities, with all that is ethically, sociopoliti-

cally and emotionally carried via their urgency, yet never
speak the whole story with Daniel Nadaud: we have spoken of
the primacy of the logic of con-struction and poietic raising
and doing, spoken too of the aesthetics-cum-ethics of grace,
charm that, even if ‘illusorily’, is oriented towards something
one could think of as a form of transcendence, a dreamed, vir-
tual overcoming of existential problem, of what Nineteenth-
Century France repeatedly called le Mal, in all or any of its
manifestations; and, furthermore, as we have seen, wit, hum-
our, play, edgy and/or charming, constitute a major mode of
Nadaud’s artistico-ontological ambitioning, a mode full of
nuance and dexterous ambivalence, a mode not by-passing the
intensity of livedness, but restoring further some measure of
that equilibrium Nadaud’s sculptures/objects materially and

metaphorically achieve: ‘the artist amuses himself’, we are
told in L’Artiste construit…;9
7: is Nadaud’s art iconoclastic, as some critics have sug-

gested?: if what is implied by iconoclasm involves a repudia-
tion of art’s former modes and presumed intentions, one
would be inclined to give only a partial encouragement to the
argument, recognizing that Nadaud’s art leaps beyond the
prestige of painting without expressing scorn for its many
genial practitioners; on the other hand, the dominant thinking
and ‘imaging’ of modern and contemporary life Nadaud
greets in substantially subversive and dissident ways, albeit
ever maintaining a personal balance – via wit, play, grace,
‘con-structive’ doing – that disallows tipping over into an art
of outright and constant polemical denunciation risking des-
pair, utter bitterness, even madness: a breaking, then, of the
images, the imagos, the masks of our presence-to-the-world,
but maintaining an at times smiling and determinedly self-
uplifting ‘illusion’ of art’s re-imag(in)ing potential;
8: in November 1971, in his notes written in Aubais, Nadaud

tells us that artistic work is ‘a place of questioning and search-
ing’, ie never a closed, achieved action or phenomenon, and,
even if it involves and may be said to constitute an ‘end in it-
self, it is above all a beginning’, ie an act and place of inci-
pience, inauguration, opening and initiation, newness and
birthing: it is perhaps thus unsurprising that a year later Na-
daud’s notes go, in a sense, even further in arguing, in the
1972 Viallat text, that art’s purpose, its very meaning, lies not
within what is done, the plastic work produced, offered, exhi-
bited and shared, but in the act of doing itself: it is as if,
though the human leaves traces, these traces not only will dis-
appear – he is conscious of this pure mortality in the same text
– but can do so with nothing of ontological significance truly
changing;
9
The etymology of s’amuser suggests being lost in thought, meditation, a diverted-
ness, serious or trifling.
9: Nadaud’s Viallat text, along with another titled RIEN doit

devenir TOUT,10 reveals much of his sense of the utter com-
plexity of all plastic meaning: whilst we may read the second
of these two texts as ironic and even offering persiflage to
Nadaud’s/any artist’s pretentious over-investment in work
produced, the first text both reaffirms art’s deep purposing as
lying in ‘work itself’, the endlessly self-exploratory flow of
being through the process of (art’s) doing, and indicates the
degree to which ‘comprehension and meaning can only be es-
tablished and transformed via becoming completely aware of
everything producing them and working towards their exis-
tence by struggling against a society that misappropriates
them and continually sugar-coats them so as to better subju-
gate them’: purposing, for Nadaud, may thus be seen to fold a
certain detachment into a mode of attachment: doing takes it
over the done, and yet what is done needs and desires a full
consciousness of a doing broadly misunderstood: the ‘no-
thingness’ and the ‘allness’ Nadaud has in mind can lead to
two logics of art, the one smiling, distanced from the value
and prestige others may or may not offer art’s gesture and
product, the other ‘struggling’ to right the misconceptions and
misappropriations arguably impacting the latter;
10: although we could see such a fused poetics of attachment-

detachment – Michel Deguy has written tellingly of this ‘con-
struct’ – as implying some artistic programme, it is important
to appreciate the absence of fixity such purposing implies: just
as individual works such as Juste ciel (1988) (with its de-
lightfully witty and yet gracefully harmonious welding of
wood and steel, shell and paint into the funkiest of small (57 x
42 x 19cm) sculptures/objects, half-Miróesque, half-Pagès-
like) or the 1986 Vingt-quatre heures de plein air (a quirky
assemblage of improbable parts, porcelain spoon handle, iron-
ing plate, chair back with its two legs, a farm fork, etc.) or,
10
A text I have been unable to contextualise and which the artist kindly sent me in a
dossier showing work up until 2002. The title I give it is imposed over the text of a
short anecdote recounting the draconian rejection of a young artist’s (Nadaud’s?)
drawings done it seems in Algeria.
again, the 2001 Filature (with its hundreds of yards of knotted

rope constituting a vast web from which hang some seventy
cattle- and other bells above the gardens of the ENAD in Au-
busson) – just as works as varied as these refuse the ever dif-
fering interpretive equations we might wish to reduce them to,
so, in more global and abstract terms, does Nadaud’s ‘pro-
gramme’ of plastic creativity retreat into the plis, the folds, of
its com-pli-catedness, a freedom that constitutes an act and
place of paradoxical simplicity where spiritual and ontological
pertinence are acted out in that maelstrom of emotional energy
where turbulence and serenity, melancholy and joy maintain a
strange synonymity.
By way of conclusion I should like to look at two ostensibly

very different works by Daniel Nadaud: the 1991-95 L’Eau régale and
the drawings of the 2007 book, Délicat désastre en trente-six poses,
with its short companion texts by Bernard Noël. Pierre Griquel de-
scribes L’Eau régale – which Nadaud himself smilingly terms ‘a 35-
piece out of service’ – as porcelain objects on ‘a raised table covered
in a white cloth [giving it the air] of a pagan altar. A silent piece in
which unusable utensils are adorned to beautiful effect, a dreamy and
cruel conceit, resisting all interpretation, free’. Nadaud does not offer
any commentary himself, the title possibly evoking the role of aqua
regia in the preparation of the ceramic effect, an aesthetic ‘triumph’
we may just conceivably see in tense opposition to the acid’s power to
dissolve the gold and platinum of reality’s utilitarian but luxury dinner
service ware, food and all. L’Eau régale’s deliberate puzzlement is
matched by its enchantment: it is as radically irreducible as it is sur-
really ‘marvellous’ via its deployed fascinations. Its exquisite delicacy
of fabrication gives grace and sereneness to its defiance. Can we see
the work as offering a sly, witty, mischievous wink to (paintings of)
the Last Supper? Certainly it would be our last, were we to consume it
– other than as pure art. L’Eau régale’s ‘spirituality’ is substantially
other, poetic, just as its availableness is foreign to all and any consu-
merism. May we deem its stark but elegant whiteness to be symbolic
of its removal from all besmirching critical discourse, all signings and
markings duly conjured away? Is its unconsumableness, its implicit
aqua regia acidity, a gesture of some aggressiveness or perhaps corro-
sive ridicule or reminder of human frailties? Is art simultaneously a
victory of sorts over life’s corrosions and dissolutions, an illusory ha-

ven from their effects, and an exposure, an ironic reminder of them?
L’Eau régale, of course, provides no answers, perhaps does not even
pose questions, preferring its poetical antinaturalness in a gesture of
aloofness or jubilance accomplishing a self-liberation that, yet, with-
out contradiction, affirms an independence from the myriad quizzings
to which its strange inedible creations give rise.
Délicat désastre en trente-six poses finds it hard, indeed im-

possible, to maintain this aesthetic distance and frustration of all her-
meneutic inquiry. Its title speaks directly, even no doubt ironically, of
the tension between aesthetic subtlety and grace, and the existential
‘disaster’ the drawings simultaneously evoke. Bernard Noël’s brief
prose poems further articulate this tension, this paradoxical fusing of
heavily contrasted human doing. And, were we by some miracle in
any doubt, Daniel Nadaud’s Postface speaks of his – and, implicitly,
(his) art’s – ‘impotence and tender unshakeable rage’ that can roar si-
lently through being and gesture. We are never, in effect, far from the
fraught poetics and ontologies of great poets and artists such as Bau-
delaire and Lautréamont, Delacroix and Rimbaud. We wonder how
beauty and wit and charm and the greatest delicacy coexist, are fused
even, in the bizarre unifiedness of human beingness and doing. Ber-
nard Noël speaks of the ‘incongruous couplings’ Nadaud’s drawings
generate – the interwoven helmet-bell-axe-plane-sock in 3;11 the
skulls-pincers-pots and pans in 11; the crown of thorns-rockets-
missiles-vegetation and unidentifiable forms in 27; the barrowful of
broken bits of weaponry in 47; and so on – couplings ever reminding
us of the logics of metaphor and symbol, their casting together of dis-
parates in that incomprehensible place of art’s oneness and, as Bonne-
foy would say, presence’s ‘One’, at once ineffable and unspeakable.
Birds, humans, seem equally shootable in a chaos of forms (ladder,
sock, train or truck) in 19. It is a chaos everywhere rife with ruin, deri-
sory ‘remainders’ (cf. 39), yet a chaos and ruin and ongoing destruc-
tion ‘sung’ into art’s saddened poetry. Noël’s proses are searingly
ironic, as sharp, as piercing as the forms proliferating in Nadaud’s
poetic images, those mariages contre nature as he calls them, alert to
their capacity to speak simultaneously – as do Noël’s own texts – of
11
I give the pagination here and below.
their imaginative power and of the terrible and unnatural marriages the
world produces all so often. Questions indeed may be deemed as vain
as answers in the times in which we live, Noël scathingly and sadly,
yet with the tireless energy of wit that is Nadaud’s too, tells us in 48.
Nadaud’s drawn heads of revolutionary thinkers (67) end up being
cooked alive – their bodies dissolved in aqua regia? Or, at least, suc-
cumbing to totalitarianism’s ‘killing of thought’ in an economy of of-
ten glitteringly empty image and weapon manufacture (cf, Noël, 40).
Daniel Nadaud may talk of impotence, and Bernard Noël of

‘violence everywhere in the three dimensions, death not opening up in
the fourth’ (30), this in the context of Nadaud’s enigmatic, ever un-
contextualised but ominous triptych (31) depicting a half-familiar
man12 in a storm of cut-up tubing (?) before a darth-vader-like bell-
mask and its surrounding instruments of attack. They may talk thusly;
and here, in Délicat désastre en trente-six poses, they do. But their
very talking-drawing, the sheer power of their poiein, their poietic re-
sistance, determination and continuing – this is the very epitome of a
potency and a potentiality that make their work, their two remarkable
oeuvres, and, in consequence, their lives, their ‘delicate’ presence to
the world, gifts for which many remain grateful.
12
Leon Trotsky?
CONCLUSION
These deliberately brief closing words will not seek to impose

some crowning synthetic rationalising structure upon the twenty-two
artists whose work I have had the pleasure to wrestle with over the last
four years. Difference has reigned, despite, inevitably, the deferral, the
différance, of interrelevancies and interweavings that all plastic ges-
ture entails. My emphasis throughout has centred on an appreciation
of the distinct creative and transformative power of unique – one
glance will separate a Calle or a Pincemin from a Garouste or a Deblé
–, highly individualized oeuvres. The gratitude to the artists I ex-
pressed in the short Preface to this book goes beyond questions of as-
sistance and exchange of ideas: it is a gratitude to the specific work
produced and the ceaseless process of production on which the latter
depends. But such work cannot be embraced via some reductive,
tightly compacting theorization smoothing out wrinkles that make up
the complex complexion of each specific oeuvre, plunged as it is in
the freest, the least congealed of sensory, sensual response, gestural
doing and contemplative consciousness. Certainly, play, wit, irony are
often rife, but so too is an intense ‘seriousness’ emanating from the
swarming experience of daily life, of the latter’s foundational perti-
nence, of the ever shifting awareness of the self’s relation to Bonne-
foy’s ‘things of the simple’ via the plastic gesture elected. To see art
as always a mode of abstraction, of evacuation of one’s direct pres-
ence to the world in favour of a plastic product definitively removed
from the fluidity of one’s being, is a simplification of the equation ev-
er renewed between artist and his or her work, his or her gesture,
doing, poiein, and not just the produced painting, sculpture, photo-
graph, etc. All gestures of all of the artists examined here deploy that
unspeakable human energeia at the centre of all doing, at the centre
too of the thinking through of this doing: there is no ‘pulling away’,
no detachedness, no indifference: art for a Pagès or a Perronne is the
very energisation of a barely sayable presence to the world, beyond
emotions of belonging or exiledness. Such art is not some aesthetic
tittification of existence. It is visceral, psychical, spiritual in the larg-
est sense of the term. It is one’s very breath, one’s enthousiasmos,
one’s blindingly incomprehensible souffle, an act of giving oneself
(back) to being, to one’s fragile yet stunningly and powerfully ever

potential beingness. The gestures of a Ben Vautier or a Geneviève
Asse – and over and above the vast specificities that my analyses have
dealt with – yet rest on an art of self-enactment, self-realisation. They
found a place/non-place of that bizarre ‘consubstantiality’ of self and
world, bios and ontos, Pierre Reverdy deemed to be at the heart of all
creative activity. And it is a place/non-place ever reinvested, re-
founded, via a gesture ever renewed, never finding satisfaction in the
produced, but rather in the act of producing, the ever desiring and on-
going process of doing. Art’s meanings are, in consequence, never
contained, said and defined. They are fluid, ever becoming, debatable,
rethinkable, contestable, ever questioned and so ever recommenced.
Art is not finality, ‘death’, but a psychical and gestural mouvance, an
act and an unplaceable place of continuous unfolding of mean-ing,
sens, orientation, not congealed significations and absolute signifiés –
like the light of the sun across a meadow chanced upon or illuminating
an old stone wall or revealing the enigmatical thereness of a face
known, ever unknown. Art, that of a Louise Bourgeois or a Joël Ker-
marrec, that of an Anne Messager or a Gérard Titus-Carmel, is, at
root, agnosis, instinctive refusal of closure, but this a-gnosis, this turn-
ing aside from the quick equations of knowing, is no weakness, no
surrender to impotence. Its energeia contradicts such a notion at every
turn. On the contrary, its agnosis is the sign, the very process and pro-
cession, the theoria, of art’s adventure, its ceaseless advent, surging,
its ever reinventing of self and all that is. It is genesis, ever here, ever
now, ever (self-)searching, (self-) querying. It is the tireless launching
and relaunching of being and the doing being renders possible. It nev-
er stays stuck either in its forme or its fond. In this it lives on the edge
of its own ontological and gestural strangeness. If this may seem more
visible with artists like Bourgeois or Pincemin, Kermarrec or Ga-
rouste, at root it is just as true for a Morellet toying with mathematics
and arguable randomness, a Viallat who opts out of ‘subject-matter’
and into an implacable self-signing doingness of being’s/art’s form, a
Perronne caught between matter’s silence and the mind’s endless fa-
bulations, a Favier facing death with the fragile tools of a ballpoint
and a wry grin. But, as we see here, the modes of any ‘sameness’ all
of this may appear to imply are delightfully and infinitely different.
The specific manner of art’s ‘praxis’ best speaks its ‘theory’, which, in
its infinite articulatableness, remains equally a pure silence. For,
Conclusion 223
beyond any conceivable ‘agendas’, emotional, ethical, socio-political,

spiritual, aesthetic, the return to any given work of any given artist
takes us ever, and far, beyond all isms, very often even beyond all de-
scription. Rather do we find ourselves faced with the disappearance of
art into its secrecy, its ‘absence’, an is-ness that is its own and that
cannot be supplied and imposed hermeneutically from outside itself.
Art, retreating into its own beingness, yet ever emerging from what it
is not, yet upon which it gazes, with you, with myself, via a doing-
and-being-in-the-world whose logic it ever tussles with in the dance of
allness.
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Contemporary French Art. - 2, Gérard Garouste, Colette Deblé, Georges Rousse, Geneviève Asse, Martial Raysse, Christian Jaccard, Joël Kermarrec, Danièle Perronne, Danie

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Contemporary French Art. - 2, Gérard Garouste, Colette Deblé, Georges Rousse, Geneviève Asse, Martial Raysse, Christian Jaccard, Joël Kermarrec, Danièle Perronne, Danie

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Contemporary French Art 2

Etudes de langue et littérature françaises

Keith Busby, †M.J. Freeman,

AMSTERDAM - NEW YORK, NY 2011

Cover design: Pier Post.

The paper on which this book is printed meets the requirements of

Unrepresenting Meaning: Gérard Garouste ................................. 9

Windows Upon the Unseen: Colette Deblé ............................... 29

The Light of Death, a Sacredness of Doing: Georges Rousse ... 47

The Intimacy of Silence: Geneviève Asse ................................. 69

Hygiene, Thought, Quest, Consent: Martial Raysse .................. 87

The Endless Imprinting of Being: Christian Jaccard ............... 111

Desire and Deception, the Metonymies of Artifice:

The Plastic Life of the Psyche: Danièle Perronne ................... 147

Structure and Aeration, Freedom and the Unnameable:

Proliferation, Mutation, Phantasm, the Ceremony of the Real:

The Art of War and Peace: Daniel Nadaud ............................. 203

Conclusion ............................................................................... 221

Selected Bibliography.............................................................. 225

The words I offer here will be extremely brief: the entirety of

cannot embrace in either of the two volumes of Contemporary French

To gaze upon works such as La Chambre rouge (1982) or

Critics from Philippe Dagen and Pierre Cabanne to Marc

Lest one might thus imagine an oeuvre in full psychic dérive,

then, is an art that depicts wildness and contingency, whilst simultan-

I should like now to examine more pointedly the shifting

out of any strictly chronological necessities of means and manners.

The material means exploited by the art of Gérard Garouste

linked’ beyond the appearance of being’s/art’s fragmentedness.

Sculpture of various modes is by no means a rare creative

Beyond, yet entirely via, such material means of creation

1: Garouste’s art is elaborated in various serial manners.

2: to accomplish such exploration Garouste tends himself to

3: in consequence, the ‘story’ of the human condition reveals

4: the challenge for Gérard Garouste, then, revolves, one

5: such manners, I should finally maintain, are not simply,

For Gérard Garouste, as indeed for many others, Marcel Du-

being-together. Though an ‘alibi’, as Pierre Cabanne writes, art and its

The purposes of this fairly extraordinary art may be manifold

Linked to this, as all these purposes and orienting values form

The purpose of Garouste’s art, then, we may argue further, is

Such conversing-without-closure can be seen, too, in almost all of the

The fact remains, as Gérard Garouste informs us, that ‘I seek

both from the 2007 series La Bourgogne, la famille et l’eau tiède,

However, in the midst of such desiderata, there can equally be

Sublimation in Garouste entails in effect no metaphysical cat-

the utopian is ‘the very purpose of painting’ for Gérard Garouste, as

the plastic form of questions ‘vertiginously reiterated’, as Marc Augé

Where does this leave the ‘meaning’ of Gérard Garouste’s

with-others/otherness-in-the-world, an experience eminently central to

In the early 1990’s Colette Deblé’s decision ‘to take up the

pears, with, happily, Antoinette Fouque’s publishing house, Des

Critics such as Jean-Luc Chalumeau and Michèle Gazier have

unsaidness, indeed unsayableness, emanates from Deblé’s two diffe-

Before moving on to examine issues pertaining to Colette

dessins of the mid-1970’s, and, finally, to the usually parenthesised or

those neither erotic nor pornographic, she argues, ‘non-drawings’ that

The question of feminism inevitably arises in an oeuvre be-

That Colette Deblé’s oeuvre, despite its ‘disappearance’ into

intolerable’, to overcome the trauma of viewing pornographic images,

An aesthetically and spiritually critical divide, an honestly

‘happiness’ where an infinite fall into its opposite threatens, a paradox

Visual analysis of the visual theatre of art’s history of repre-