All men, in the vertiginous moment of coitus, are the same man.
All men who repeat a line of Shakespeare, are William Shakespeare."If you do not want your eyes and your senses to fade,
Run after the sun—in the shadow!
Something begins in order to end: an adventure does not allow itself to be extended; it only has meaning through its death. Towards this death, which will perhaps also be mine, I am drawn without return. Each moment appears only to bring those that follow. To each moment I cling with all my heart: I know it is unique, irreplaceable—and yet I would not make a gesture to prevent it from annihilating itself. This last minute I spend—in Berlin, in London—in the arms of this woman met the night before—a minute I love passionately, a woman I am close to loving—it is going to end, I know it. In a moment I will leave for another country. I will find neither this woman nor ever this night again. I lean over each second, I try to exhaust it; nothing passes that I do not seize, that I do not fix forever within me—nothing, neither the fugitive tenderness of those beautiful eyes, nor the street noises, nor the false light of dawn: and yet the minute flows away and I do not hold it back; I love that it passes.
The world is ephemeral. Lately, I repeat this phrase to myself incessantly. Each moment that flows by and disappears fills me with sadness. Thus, even moments of joy quickly transform into melancholy. I know that this sadness will only end when I have fully accepted and affirmed, with my whole being, the fleetingness of these moments and our insignificance in this universe. But it is difficult for me.
I, too, have drawn energy for living from what is called 'positive nihilism.' The fact that everything is devoid of meaning allows us to be all the more free. I still understand this, at least with my head. And yet, each moment that flows by appears terribly cruel to me.
Is art there to seize the fleeing moments? Is it a desperate attempt to retain all these moments that disappear? Or is it to make us realize this reality once more, and to console us? Am I capable of answering these questions?
The other day, I went to a live jazz bar. What I like about jazz is its capacity to create infinite variations within a single framework. It is something great that traverses our lives. Anyway, I was listening to the band play. The group was a quartet composed of a piano, a double bass, a drum set, and a voice. Judging by the rhythm of the drums, they were playing swing. The bass and the drums, which had a fast tempo, seemed divergent while creating a harmonious rhythm; the piano and guitar also fulfilled their roles. The music swept me away too, but it didn't last long. I had the impression that all the notes were passing through me, striking something somewhere, and then finally falling to the ground to disappear. Even while listening to jazz, I felt this impermanence gnawing at me. It saddened me deeply. That night, I went home shortly after.
Good art needs no explanation. This is one of the immutable convictions of my thought.
To avoid being assimilated by the culture industry, art only accesses its truth when it refuses to smooth over the ugliness and inauthenticity of today's world and society under the varnish of satisfying emotions. Instead, its truth is found when its forms expose the ruptures and contradictions of our damaged lives.
The ugly can become beautiful. The pretty, never.
Decorative style has never existed. Style is the soul, and unfortunately, for us, the soul takes the form of the body.
In almost every case, our way of appearing is our way of being. The mask is the face.
Everything possesses a double face.
Their distinctive characteristic is not to produce conceptual knowledge (which is the proper characteristic of discursive or scientific knowledge—such as philosophy, sociology, psychology, history), but to arouse something like an excitement, a phenomenon of engagement, a judgment in a state of fascination or captivity. In other words, the knowledge we acquire through art is an experience of the form or style of knowledge, rather than a knowledge of something (like a fact or a moral judgment) in itself.
An artist once said that those who perceive the world with more sensitivity can become artists. One day, when I confided to a friend that the flight of every moment made me sad, he asked if I wasn't being too sensitive. The link between these two apparently unrelated events is one of the fascinating aspects of life.
Art is a seduction, not a rape.
Artists are fools who believe the impossible is possible and who never stop defying. They are people who, praying to become 'One,' endlessly stack 'Nines'.
In the Oriental tradition, listening much and speaking little is a virtue.
It has already been a long time since I stopped writing. During this period of interruption, I haven't painted either. These two facts do not result from an intention, but rather seem to be a mere coincidence. But is it truly a coincidence?
After reading ten thousand books, filling your heart with a thousand emotions, and traveling ten thousand leagues—only then, take up the brush."
Making art is like believing in God: believing in what is invisible. But God is dead. Art, too, is perhaps dead. Yet, we continue to believe.
Is God truly dead?
From today I suspend
Around my neck the watch that marks the hours:
From today the course of the stars ceases.
Of the sun, the cock's crow, the shadows;
And all that time has ever proclaimed,
Is now mute, deaf, and blind: —
For me, all nature falls silent,
At the tick-tock of the law and the hour.
This way of expression illustrates well what a brain-centered thought is. However, I find that works finished in this manner often lack flavor. No, sometimes they even seem appalling to me. It is as if the idea had become the work directly.
What bores me is precisely this clarity. It is so dazzling that it chokes me and becomes unbearable. This clarity is born from a brain-centered thought, which cuts off every snag with the outside, despises the body, and relegates them to a position of exteriority.
The simple fact of feeling or seeing the world is already in itself a mysterious phenomenon, but it sometimes happens that what, in normal times, went unnoticed suddenly opens in a brilliant way: objects and their surroundings become luminous. It is a poetic moment where the gaze and the world meet. There are no special moments given in advance; what the painter or the photographer captures as a suspended instant—that is truly the world and what deserves to be seen. Signs and clues of something accumulate until speech stops. It is an interruption in the continuity of the daily, a rupture of the fine film of space, but also a happy moment of correspondence between the object and the gaze. Yet, in the blink of an eye, everything disappears and the ordinary resumes its course as if nothing had happened. Time finds its continuity, the slit closes, and the surroundings become an invisible space once again.
'Faithful to nature and complete!' — How does he manage it?
Since when does nature submit to a painting?
Infinite is the smallest patch of the world! —
In the end, he paints what pleases him.
And what pleases him? What he knows how to paint!
He is incapable of withdrawing from the coarsest of art's temptations: that of playing the genius.
Even a technically correct expression seems fade if it does not allow a trace of indistinction to be perceived. In art, even an incorrect expression can have value if it touches the heart.
That which is perfect does not always have more value than that which is not.
The pleasure of drawing lies in its human scent, which directly reveals the groping of the hand. Drawing tolerates the artist's inattention, which opens many possibilities; and because it does not reach an absolute determination, it sometimes allows us to become aware of the existence of another world and to taste freedom and emancipation.
In general, I hate discoursing on my craftsmanship or writing about it. If I do not find adequate words to express these thoughts, it is for a positive reason: the conviction that art is much greater and nobler than our own skill or erudition. Although it is shaped by human skill, a work of art is not created solely by the hand; it springs from a much deeper source, from the human soul.
A characteristic of illustration is the importance given to the description of forms, into which the illustrator integrates his own style. Generally, human skin is covered with a flesh color. Of course, elements such as blushing are sometimes represented, but variations in skin color are not taken into account. What matters to them is the form. This particularity can make the image pleasant to look at, but it is violent insofar as it ignores differences to unify them into a single element.
Vanity of vanities, says the Preacher, vanity of vanities, all is vanity.
I have the impression that a painter and an artist are different. From a rational point of view, I know well that a painter is an artist. But deep down, something tells me that it is not quite true. I think this phenomenon comes from the definition I give to the word 'artist.' For me, an artist is a person for whom ideas are necessary. Whereas a painter gains depth by rejecting ideas. Some might say what I have just expressed is totally absurd. It’s possible. But I believe everyone can, in one way or another, vaguely feel what I am trying to say.
I would like to paint in such a way that, at a push, everyone with eyes could see clearly.
It is looking at things for a long time that ripens and makes one conceive more deeply. I had not thought I would have found them so true.
More ambiguous, his detractors will say; but ambiguity is a richness.
It matters less to me that my color be precisely identical, to the letter, as long as it looks beautiful on my canvas as it looks beautiful in life.
At the Whitney Museum, one can see many works by Edward Hopper. In Korea too, many people appreciate his work, but for my part, I have long thought he was one of the most overrated artists. This does not mean his work is mediocre, but simply that not all of his works are good. Among his paintings, I find, for example, the one representing the back of a woman knitting to be truly exceptional. However, many of his works seem too static and lacking in energy. It is not because they are static that they lack energy; it is because they lack energy that they are static. But while walking through New York, a thought suddenly crossed my mind: perhaps this is not his fault, but rather the fault of the city.
If the artist, indeed, at every new manifestation of truth, turns away from this revealing clarity and always contemplates with delight what, despite this clarity, remains obscure still, the theoretical man sates himself with the spectacle of conquered darkness, and finds his highest joy in the advent of a new truth, endlessly victorious and imposing itself by its own force.
The edge of wisdom turns against the wise; wisdom is a crime against nature."
To express that a space is empty while being full, deliberately leaving a surface blank is a method too one-dimensional. It is deeper to fill that space while giving a sensation of emptiness—and despite everything, of plenitude—by evoking a sort of infinity. It is a principle similar to making movement felt in a still image, which is more powerful than actually giving movement to an object. When one truly puts an object in motion, it seduces, but with a diabolical seduction.
What is diabolical seduction?
Madame! That would not be prudent. Withdraw!
What makes painting truly pictorial is the gesture (le geste), and that is why it is not necessary for a painting to be realistic.
At school, I spoke with a professor about speed in painting. He said that a painting realized quickly, in a spontaneous gesture, is more impressive than one realized slowly, with meticulous attention to detail. For to paint quickly is execution, not reflection. The brush must go faster than thought.
Art is a personal apperception; the artist must be able to construct and inscribe in their painting what they have understood.
I must tell you again that the painter makes himself through the sensation he has of nature and through his means of expression, once these become familiar to him. He should have no other concern than to express what he sees. All theory risks leading him into error."
I was told I must find a subject that interests me. But I disagree. What interests me is our life, and not a particular object. The subject is a constraint. It is not I who chooses the subject; it is the subject that chooses me.
I am disgusted by having to seek explanations for my paintings. I no longer want to do it once my studies are over. But Paul said that even after the degree, it would not stop. A painting whose value cannot be seen without explanation... what an affront to my self-esteem (amour-propre).
If Shakespeare had not existed, would the world be very different today?
When the tree dances,
The wind rises.
When the tree settles,
The wind falls asleep too.
To understand a painter, one must see many of their works. In the same way, to understand the world, we need many painters.
I no longer wish to paint pictures that intensely seduce people.
In painting, everything that is not the final result is merely a philosophical choice of the painter.
Paint what you see, but do not describe.
There is sadness in beauty. It is a knife that pierces our heart. But this pain, instead of killing us, transforms into a form of consolation.
In the face of the old man crushed by the most terrible adversity and condemned, for all that concerns him, to the state of a true patient—there stands a supernatural serenity, descended from divine spheres, showing us that the hero, in this state of pure passivity, reaches the highest degree of his activity, which remains effective long after him, whereas the thoughts and efforts of his earlier life only led him to passivity.
I understood that even in a single line, in a single stroke, resided something unfathomable. It was precisely that kind of fascinating clarity proper to the background, coupled with an enigmatic depth, or rather, an infinity.
The artistically impotent man creates for himself an adequate form of art precisely because he is the anti-artistic man in himself. As he does not suspect the Dionysian depth of music, he metamorphoses musical enjoyment for his own use into a rational understanding of a rhetoric of passion made of sounds and words... because he is refused the power of vision, he demands the help of the stage-hand and the decorator... he imagines being transported to a time where passion alone is enough to generate songs and poems; as if passion had ever been capable of creating anything artistic. The premise of the opera is based on a mistaken conception of the nature of art... the manifestation of dilettantism that dictates its laws with the optimistic serenity of the theoretical man.
Love is the only thing we can perceive that transcends the dimensions of time and space.
Predestined for your orbit,
What does the darkness matter to you, O star?
Roll on, blessed one, through this time!
Thinkers whose stars follow cyclical routes are not the most profound; he who looks into himself as into an immense universe and carries within him Milky Ways also knows how irregular all Milky Ways are; they lead directly into the chaos and the labyrinth of existence.
I notice that there are so many people who draw very well technically. Most of them learned, or are learning, painting in what are commonly called 'art academies.' They produce works that recall those seen in the Louvre or the Musée d'Orsay, and their quality is not bad. Yet, their paintings evoke no affection. Why? The first reason that comes to mind is that no sincerity seems to emanate from their works. They are simply occupied with painting 'well.' They seem to have mentally integrated a process: how to treat light and shadow, how to respect perspective, how to apply color, and they paint by mechanically following this process. But the world in which we live is something else entirely.
He who knows he is profound strives for clarity; he who wishes to appear profound to the crowd strives for obscurity.
Our thoughts are the shadows of our feelings—always darker, emptier, and simpler than they are.
Build your cities on Vesuvius! Send your ships into uncharted seas!
I seized this intuition on the wing, along the path. To prevent it from flying away, I captured it in haste with my clumsy words as soon as it fell under my hand. But in striking these parched words, the intuition died, withering in its turn, and it now hangs from the words, inanimate. Contemplating this, I no longer understand why I felt such happiness at the moment I captured this bird.
The nature of animal consciousness is such that the world of which we can become conscious is only a world of surfaces and signs, a generalized and vulgarized world; everything that becomes conscious becomes, by that very fact, flat, thin, relatively stupid—it becomes a generalization, a sign, a herd-mark. As soon as one takes consciousness, a great fundamental corruption occurs: a falsification, a flattening, a vulgarization.
If one looks closely, one can see an inner agitation within it.
Fugitive moments vibrate in me. When can they finally be stilled? These whispers and their breath. The world is mischievous.
Life pours down.
I do not seek to capture a moment and fix it on the canvas. Is that not an illusion, or even a form of greed? What I want is to allow for the acceptance of a reality where everything disappears. To find beauty at the heart of this immense sadness.
My learned friends! I bless you, even for your hunchback. And also because you despise, as I do, the literati and the parasites of culture! And because you do not know how to market your spirit! Because you only have opinions that cannot be expressed in monetary value! And because you do not represent what you are not! Because you have no other will than to become masters of your craft... and a radical aversion to everything that is mere appearance, half-truth, tinsel, virtuosity—to everything that cannot present itself before you with absolute probity in its preparation and its means!
Everything is the reduction and enlargement of everything.
A kind of severity of taste that he possessed, a will to never write anything but things of which he could say: 'It is sweet,' and which had made him pass for so many years as a sterile artist, precious, a carver of nothings, was on the contrary the secret of his strength. For habit makes the style of the writer as well as the character of the man. The author who has several times contented himself with reaching a certain pleasantness in the expression of his thought thus forever sets the limits of his talent... just as by often yielding to pleasure, to laziness, or to the fear of suffering, one draws upon a character where retouching finally becomes impossible: the figure of his vices and the limits of his virtue.
Unrealized possibilities within an immense wave. To be able to smile even while looking at them.
잎새에 이는 바람에도
나는 괴로워했다.
별을 노래하는 마음으로
모든 죽어가는 것들을 사랑해야지.
Truth is not born from consciousness.
They asked me how it could be possible, asserting that it was impossible for me. I cannot explain how it is possible. That would be an attempt to bring painting back into the realm of language. Instead of such a colonization, I believe I can show it through painting.
Painting cannot be realized in the manner of nature, but in the manner of painting. Conversely, since painting is nothing other than painting, it must, above all else, be a painting.
Regarding all aesthetic values, I now make this capital distinction; in each particular case, I ask myself: 'Was it hunger or abundance that was creative here?' [...] The desire to destroy, to change, to become, can be the expression of an overflowing force, pregnant with the future. But it can also be the hatred of the indigent, the poor, the disinherited, who destroys—who must destroy—because what exists, and even all existence, all reality, revolts and irritates him. [...] The will to eternalize also demands a double interpretation. It can come, on one hand, from gratitude and love: an art of this origin will always be an art of apotheosis. But it can also be the tyrannical will of a great sufferer, a struggler, a tortured soul, who would like to erect into a binding law and a force of coercion what is most personal, most individual, most narrow—the specific characteristic of his own malady—and who avenges himself, so to speak, on all things by imprinting, incorporating, branding them with his image, the image of his torture. This last case is romantic pessimism in its most expressive form, the great event of our cultural destiny.
The image is impoverished when it seeks to become intellectual itself.
More and more, other things leave me, and the more they leave me, the faster my gaze becomes at seeing the pictorial side. Art demands dogged work—work in spite of everything—and a continuous observation.
Those who produce works of genius are not those who live in the most delicate milieu, who have the most brilliant conversation, or the widest culture, but those who have had the power—abruptly ceasing to live for themselves—to make their personality like a mirror, such that their life (however mediocre it might be socially or even, in a certain sense, intellectually) is reflected in it; genius consisting in the reflecting power and not in the intrinsic quality of the reflected spectacle."
I reflect on direct photography and direct recording. I think these processes have taken over what painters of the past believed they had to do in terms of illustration. And I believe that abstract painters, realizing this, said to themselves: why not reject all illustration and all forms of recording, and simply produce effects of form and color? Logically, this is quite correct. But it did not work, for it seems that the obsession with something living that one wants to record gives a tension and an excitement much greater than when one has simply decided to move forward freely by recording forms and colors.
Painting is never a 'realized idea.' It is the result of correspondences between elements that are both necessary and arbitrary. Even when a theme or a concept is pre-established, the act of creation, through the multiple interactions of elements, inevitably transforms it. Painting is an event of a living world, and not a mere ground where the painter's image would unfold unilaterally.
Sometimes, particular things are only attributes or accessory forms that open and unfold within a universal and infinite background; yet, behind them sit essences, as well as the true determinations of the pure ego, or rather of the 'Self,' sealed at the heart of this background.
Knowing that one can do nothing in the immediate does not allow for a change in the situation either. It is only a form of autohypnosis that gives the illusion of success. What would be much more effective is to find something in which one can be totally immersed.
I thought he had finished reading this work composed of nine volumes in total. However, he told me he had only read the first volume, adding that this book did not suit him. When I asked him why, my friend replied that this book would be considered good if one managed to experience pleasure in the very act of reading.
As soon as a concept enters the painting, it ceases to be truly painting and becomes conceptual art. Painting is not the ideal medium to carry a concept. The purpose of painting lies in painting itself. Neither in representation, nor in the concept, but in the painting. Why paint? To reach the image itself, to reject the illusion that everything originates from consciousness, to restore to our body and our senses their status, to break the idol of consciousness, to chase away the demon of the concept.
We are Orpheus, repeatedly returning to the Underworld to seek Eurydice; Ahab, setting out in search of Moby Dick toward a sea ready to swallow us; and at the same time Sisyphus, climbing the mountain over and over again.
When I say that the painter must not think, I always mean that he must not think at the moment he paints. It is like saying one must think of nothing at the moment one presses the shutter.
I am in the process of pursuing something. Which escapes the moment I seize it, which traverses me the moment it approaches, which disperses the moment it shows itself.
He said he loved brushstrokes thrown with a fast and free gesture. This type of stroke resonates with the spirit of Oriental painting. In Oriental painting, what counts is the steady breath at the moment of the gesture, for once traced, the line cannot be corrected. Each brushstroke is definitive. This is why Oriental painting is an exercise in discipline and spirituality. It is a form of meditation. (Korean painting has other characteristics, but we will talk about them later.) This trend is not limited to painting.
However, what I seek to do is different. The spirit of Oriental painting is imbued with a scholarly, 'literati' attitude. It is so focused on meditation that it sometimes seems devoid of the true intensity of life. I want to express the harshness of existence. Rather than a single definitive brushstroke, I prefer gestures that erase, layer, and mix colors throughout the process. I want a painting that is more human, closer to the earth, where one succumbs to temptations, where one falls and gets back up incessantly—a painting in the manner of Sisyphus, rather than a painting turned toward transcendence.
Jean-François Lyotard uses the term 'the figural' as a noun, opposing it to 'that which is figurative.’
There are only two ways for painting to escape the figurative: one is to aim for pure form through abstraction, the other is to move toward the purely figural through extraction or isolation. If the painter attaches himself to the Figure and chooses this second path, it is to oppose the figural to the figurative. Here, the isolation of the Figure is the first condition. Figuration (or representation) implies a relationship between the image and the object it is supposed to show. But representation also implies the relationship of one image to other images in a constituted whole, where each image has its object. Narration always accompanies this 'showing.' Between two images, a story inserts itself or always seeks to insert itself to animate the represented whole. Isolation is therefore the simplest means—necessary but not sufficient—to break with representation, shatter narration, prevent illustration, and liberate the Figure.
Partial erasure techniques and 'assignifying' touches—though they are capable of autonomously 'making' a landscape, a background, or darkness—belong to an original system that is neither that of landscape, nor the informal, nor the background.
Modern painting is invaded and besieged by photographs and clichés that have already settled on the canvas before the painter even begins his work. In fact, it is wrong to believe that the painter works on a white and virgin surface. The surface is already potentially covered by all sorts of clichés from which the painter must detach himself.
One must reject dichotomous thinking. Eternity is in the instant, and in the becoming, there is already repetition. They do not come separately.
Photography is not the figuration of what someone has seen, but what modern man sees himself. Photography is not dangerous simply because it is figurative, but because it claims to reign over the 'point of view'—that is to say, over painting itself.
The path of the Figure is what Cézanne gave the simple name of 'sensation.' The Figure is the sensible form linked to sensation. Sensation acts directly on the nervous system, which is the system of the flesh. Abstract form, on the other hand, addresses itself much more to the bones, for it operates through the intermediary of the brain.
Sensation is not only the opposite of the easy, the ready-made, the cliché, but also the opposite of the 'superficially sensational' or the spontaneous. Sensation has one side turned toward the subject (the nervous system, vital movement, 'instinct,' 'temperament,' etc.) and one side turned toward the object (the fact, the place, the event). Or rather, it is neither one nor the other, or both indissociably: it is, as phenomenologists say, 'being-in-the-world.' In sensation, I become in the sensation and, at the same time, something happens through the sensation—one by the other, one in the other. Finally, it is the same body that gives the sensation and receives it, being both object and subject.
Negatively, Bacon says that form (Figure) reduced to sensation is the opposite of form (figuration) reduced to the object it is supposed to represent. According to Valéry, sensation is what is transmitted directly, without passing through the detour or clutter of a story to be told. Positively, Bacon constantly asserts that sensation passes from one 'order' to another, from one 'level' to another, from one 'domain' to another. This is why sensation is the master of deformation and the agent of the body's metamorphosis. In this regard, the same reproach can be leveled at both figurative and abstract painting: they pass through the brain; they do not act directly on the nervous system. They are neither sensible nor do they release a Figure, for they remain on one and the same level. They can effect transformations of form, but they do not achieve the deformation of the body.
Some might say my painting is nothing but a banal repetition. Others will say it is as successful as a photograph. As for me, I intend to persist a little longer in my obstinacy.
The body is, as Merleau-Ponty discerned, an ambiguous thing that does not belong to me exclusively but is linked to the outside world. It is because man is a corporeal being that he can be a being-in-the-world. In this sense, one must keep in mind that the expressions 'my hand' or 'my eyes' are strictly erroneous and are merely linguistic conveniences. The body serves as a mediator between the outside and the inside, opening man to what is more largely open. Consciousness and the body can collaborate, but they are not identical. It is the body, much more than consciousness, that is engaged with the vast world. The body is also part of the external world.
The world closes in on me by seizing me, and I open myself toward the world while opening it in turn.
Painting converts the skepticism of the brain into an optimism of the nerves.
There is a community of the arts, and a problem common to all: as in music, the problem in painting—that is to say, in art—is not to invent or reproduce forms, but to capture forces. It is precisely for this reason that no art is figurative. Klee’s famous formula—'Not to render the visible, but to make visible'—means nothing else. The task of painting is defined as an attempt to make visible forces that are not.
Painting must make visible the force of folding in a mountain, the force of germination in an apple, or the thermal force of a landscape.
Each instant needs its own time to be assimilated.
As in the first days of the world, they seemed to be only two on earth. Or rather, in a closed world, erected by the logic of a creator named 'Sonata,' and closed to everything else, they were only two.
The active is the fall. But this does not necessarily mean a descent by expansion into space. It is a descent as a passage of sensation, a difference of strata understood within sensation.
All tension is felt in the fall.
There must first be a 'will to lose the will.' It is at the moment one escapes through refusal that the painter's work can begin.
The painter has a more or less precise idea of what he wants to do, and this pre-pictorial idea is enough to make the probabilities unequal. Thus, when an unequal probability becomes almost certain, I can finally paint. But at that precise moment, when I begin to paint, what must I do so that what I paint does not become a cliché? For that, one must project 'free marks' very quickly inside the painted image to destroy the figuration that is beginning to sprout, and thus give a chance to the Figure. Here, the Figure is improbability itself. These marks are sudden accidents, 'chance.' But we know that this very word 'chance' no longer designates probabilities, but a choice and an action that have no relationship with previous probabilities. One can say that these marks are in no way representative, for they proceed from a fortuitous act and express nothing linked to the visible image. These marks concern only the hand of the painter.
The painter's problem is not to enter the canvas, for he is already there (pre-pictorial task), but to get out of it, and thereby to get out of the cliché and the probabilities (pictorial task). It is the manual marks that give him the chance.
Make it look like the subject, but through accidental and non-resembling means.
But one must hide it with ruse.
The painter traverses the catastrophe, embraces the chaos, and attempts to emerge from it."
For these marks, these traces, are irrational, involuntary, free, accidental. They are neither representative, nor illustrative, nor narrative.
The brushstroke creates the form and does not merely fill it. Consequently, each movement of the brush on the canvas modifies the contours and implications of the image.
Abstract art is only a gratuitous fantasy about nothing. Nothing comes from nothing. One needs specific images to unlock the deepest sensations, and the mystery of accident and intuition to create the singular.
Lee Ufan confided that he did not become the composer he wished to be, but that he became what he despised most: a painter, a sculptor. Music and painting do not tend toward the same direction. If music seeks to rise toward the heavens, painting is a fall toward reality. However, this fall is not negative; it is comparable, so to speak, to a fall like the Incarnation of God. A fall for salvation.
In my view, Lee Ufan attempted to reach the goals of music through painting and the visual arts. He succeeded quite well, but it remains a domain where music excels more."
I said that I wanted to paint in a way that conceals the Figure, the structure, and the contour, because I find they are presented too directly in the paintings of Francis Bacon. Was the term 'conceal' problematic? In fact, I did not expect the concept of the 'figural' itself to be misunderstood. I wanted to melt these elements more subtly, more harmoniously onto the surface of the canvas. Of course, I am still looking for my own method. However, the more violent touches he spoke of are a path I have already traveled and surpassed. I do not seek to exhibit. I refuse the easy way out.
There is always a point to go further.
Earthly misery remains foreign and distant to you.
Your splendor is made for distant worlds.
Consider pity a vice.
The only commandment you need: Be pure!