Poetics & aphorisms

To bathe the hands in the moist blues and separate the dry greens.
The intense red longs for the yellow without limits.

It is the painter’s suicide: not finding the way to give scale — with extreme sensibility and intelligence — to his painting, its language and its structure.
What use, then, is his knowledge if he ends up a slave to himself?

We painters bathe ourselves with colours at the spring.
Our lines, non-existent in nature, evoke — by discovering — what has been lived.

A cliff of violent red earths
A sea or a sky?
Some branches
greens and yellows
eccentric painting.

Ungraspable infinite
Landscape
Waters between silvers
Lapis lazuli in desire
Among the leaves that are red writings of the tree.

In painting “To See” is “To Be”.
If not, I paint, I draw, I die.

Portraits again. Painting is, from the beginning, matter that transports us. Then the likeness, the evidence. And the consequence: the mystery, falling in love with the person. The desire to possess the portrait.

Cioran: “What I know destroys what I want.”
And as a painter I say: “might it not be that what I know destroys what I see?”

Nudes and more nudes, men, women.
In the Shunga, savage and hard.
Beautiful and free bodies live in their pleasure.

I begin the nude drawings from the knees
or from the feet
or from the waist
or from the hands
or from the head — a line descending across forehead and nose and lips and the curve of the neck
Man or woman.

In the contemplation of nature we do not see that it is built with lines. It is built with air.

The light of the baroque is the painting of Murillo,
golden clarity — is it the representation of God or of death, the void?
Disappearance, the loss of everything surrounds us; we live in fragility.
His painting “Two Women at a Window” overwhelms us, paralyses us; the woman leaning out desires us — is there a greater force?

At what moment do paintings choose us?
even without distinguishing the names of the colours
does it matter?

I return to it — flowers of the Garden.
Whites with yellows on greens or blues or pinks and ochres!
These days it rains, the damp is contagious.

I paint a nude — woman, feet raised.
Colour is a caress on her skin.
Among scents of honeysuckle.

It is cold at this end of summer; I paint enormous nudes in a garden, one with feet raised, another with insolence in her gaze. Shakespeare: “it is not yet near day; it was the nightingale, and not the lark, that pierced the fearful hollow of thine ear”. To hear in the darkness — to see in the light?

Painting. According to Cioran, “wisdom is baneful to genius, fatal to talent”. Radicality. To see is an activity. Even when it is only meant for pleasure.

I fabricate landscapes. I do not paint landscapes. This southern tree on the cliff of fire that, as in Heine’s poem, longs for the northern oak covered in snow, draws us into the evocation of desire.

I draw in White Sands — white gypsums that lead to madness, suffocating heat and cold sands, dragged among winds without a north, immense spaces with signs of impossible delicacy, without water without living, quick black strokes on a paper turned into spaces between signs. Our perception changes reality; White Sands is cruelty and death clothed in unfathomable beauty. My drawings are now works whose references dwell in memory.

Landscape that is reality in its evocation — that is, the appearance of outer forms without any spiritual meaning? The gaze is not innocent. Landscape stirs the memory of what has been lived. What is outer ends up being a subjective interior. Memories of endless roads: I see the tree and long for its shade. Is landscape a reality, an idea? Thus we understand it as a concept of reason.

Painting is a language independent of whoever uses it. We create by transcending language. Nature is fabricated by the painter. Just as Cézanne insisted that “nature is within us”. And our interiorised nature — is it our childhood? Is it our sensations and memories of scents, tastes, illusions, frustrations and desires? Thus painting is evidence of the raw force of our spring.

Beauty — and its loss? It is an act of cruelty. “Nature is beautiful when it at the same time possesses the appearance of art, and art cannot be called beautiful unless we are aware that it is art.” Kant leads us along sensible paths. Does beauty exist in science? That is, creation that exists with its languages, and beauty at its limit, are the only things that let the shock of existence surface.

We live in days when we may use the language of painting as we please. Dogmatisms are behind us. Now is Freedom, days of complete and total freedom — and curiously, no one demands of us or asks us to account. The history of painting is the walk through the works already made; it is our choice.

The obligation of a deduction will kill us. Painting lives in our sensible perception. Let us drink from our spring. Let us ask for the absolute — no less.

Can painting be reached through appreciation? Here L. Wittgenstein tells us that not only is it hard to describe what appreciation consists of — it is impossible.

For the ancient Egyptian, to sleep was to enter into death. In the morning I wake and I see light — is God light? Colour is light. Hegel: “painting represents the interior under form; but its proper ground is sensible subjectivity” — is he speaking of God? “the representation, the totality, is nothing other than the absolute itself in its truth”.

The red of the fish mixes with the vegetable greens and yellows over ultramarine blue and waters reflecting blind light. The intermingled air builds the vast painting. Scent of saltpetre.

Creation is not born from a desire for permanence. It is a shock that confronts us with the abyss. So it is better to count on silence even when unwished. All else is less.

Painting in its existence. Pure enigma.
A painting is its miracle. Pure visibility.

The absolute work, unfathomable. To arrive and dwell in the sixth stage. Ungraspable painting. Hegel is the reference: he speaks of how the outer world must be forged in a manner conforming to the absolute, to reach a manifestation, a creation, that corresponds to it — that is, sensible, and to be penetrated by the absolute.
That is, to live our life in the essential.

In the garden, in Normandy, before the pond with flowers, plants, an island, trees and leaves in the reflection, white butterflies and blue dragonflies, warm breeze at the August noon, I draw upon a great table a scroll of Japan paper twenty metres long, unfathomable. Cioran: “only the spirit that implies the obligation to exist is subversive”.

I draw on the beach — bodies, boats and their sails, children playing with sand and ball, people sleeping or reading, the air caresses us, pure pleasure and delight; at low tide the beach is infinite. To paint, to draw, a thousand times, these beaches.

For fifty years painting everything, everything — the sky, hands, trees, birds, faces, naked bodies, fish in the YuYuan of Shanghai, Castilian landscapes, the north Atlantic sea of the Azores, landscapes of the French southwest, in Paris the river Seine and its bridges and the Jardin des Plantes, the empty deserts of the southern US and White Sands, the far islands, the waters around Seattle, dogs, flowers and plants and mountains and rivers, the clouds and their shadows. Each day, in full, I paint the whole.

Imagination and understanding, according to Kant, constitute genius; and so imagination is an instrument of knowledge, and understanding must fit itself to the concept.
And no science teaches how to be a genius, as a proper and subjective expression. And Kant mingles soul, spirit; genius reveals a new rule or form of language that could not be, did not exist, in any prior concept or in any that preceded it.
And I ask: who is capable of understanding or seeing the genius?

To paint is to live in space; I think and work and live from and within colour.

Everything I see is lines.
Outer images — houses in the landscape, trees with their fruit, the cliffs, faces at the tables on Paris terraces — lines.
And the hard cold air that struck us this morning with icy water — can it be drawn?

To be revolutionary in the language of painting: it is “to be” — at once the simplest and the most difficult.
It produces perplexity.
For this, the painter lives in a-temporality.

To bathe in light and play with colour and line, and on the surface create evocation — does anyone offer more? That is painting.

I think in painting
I live within the colours
From pink to gold
From green to ultramarine blue
In autumn the ochres enfold me in their damp.