Deleuze approaches painting temporally.
It would consist of 3 interconnected moments:
PRE-PICTORIAL
. World of given clichés and ready-made ideas
. What is given in the canvas before the
painting begins (canvas /page is not blank, it’s
full)
. Virtual
. Ghosts and shadows projected on the
canvas
. Fundamentally visual
. In the head everything is on the same plane
. Narration & illustration
. What the painter intends to do
ACT OF PAINTING EMERGENCE
OF THE NEW
. Painting has to pass through a catastrophe . What comes out of the catastrophe, what
in order to give birth to the new emerges
. Diagram is a chaos-seed, a chaos such that . The painting itself, neither foreseen nor
something comes out of it preconceived
. It acts as a zone of interference, of cleaning . Pictorial factum
or breaking down of representation
. Presence
. It implies distortion, deformation of pre-
given form through the play of forces . The image without resemblance
. Fundamentally manual, a manual act (only . Color
the hand liberated from the eye and the . Line
visual givens, the hand animated by a foreign . Light
will, can introduce chaos)
. A set of strokes
. The possibility of fact, an opening up of
possibilities
 INTENTIONAL FORM PLACE OF INVISIBLE FORCES FORM (DEFORMED) IN RELATION TO FORCE
(the intention of the painter)

PRE-GIVEN ORDER CHAOS-SEED CHAOSMOS

(composition of chaos)

Deleuze accepts main artistic categories but redefines them according to their relationship with chaos:

Abstract expressionism has a tendency to maximize the introduction of chaos (through a hand liberated from the eye and that produces
shapeless lines and shapeless colors).

Geometric abstraction reduces chaos to a minimum and tends to replace it with a code.

Figurative painting makes a measured use of chaos, preventing it from too much contraction or too much expansion.