T H E  S T A I N


Painting reminds the artist - who has the habit or the opportunity to practice it - something disturbing. From the heights of the idea and composition, a sudden fall burst: the stain on a place that was not ready to welcome it, both on a surface intended to be immaculate, on the carpet or on the clothes . This unwelcome drop is a call to order by the disorder, an admonition of the eternal irrational relative to the ingenuous intentionality.
A stain, therefore, is not always a fortunate or unfortunate randomness, but rather a manifestation of the anguish contained in any act of mastery.
This is why letting down, drooling, dripping a more or less viscous colour, before being an apology of hazard, is a posture towards the irrational, a rigorous consideration of the anguish by the extremely sophisticated foolishness of painting.



S E N S E  I S   N O T   A N   E X I S T E N T I A L   I S S U E


If sense in art is nothing more than a seduction of the idea by metaphor, always fraught with meanings, it implies a symbolist relation to the real, which can not be more inaccurate.

On the contrary, sense as direction of the sign, supposes a movement, a speed, a rhythm. Nothing is closer to the feeling of life. What is at the origin of the word - the movement (motio) of the idea forming concepts, which in turn seek to embrace the real in an always incomplete identity relation - is in solidarity with certain metaphysics that seeks no consolation.

sept / 19

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There are those whose thought weaken in socialization. Those who do not dream of laying bare art can not dream of anything other than killing it. The two programs do not share the same realism.
Instead of going towards the other, we should ask ourselves the question of being to pretend to otherness. But if the question is already difficult to ask, can we expect any answer?

August / 19

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A   S P E E C H   H E A R D   F R O M   F A R

(About Lontananza)


The alteration of words isolates the contemplative matter from the verbal sign.
Isidore Isou wrote, after having felt at the back of the language an anti-linguistic abyss, that there is “a human sound value (vocal, ordinary, non-melodic, non-instrumental) which is formed by the action of noises as a discourse heard at a distance.”
The sense of the discourse participates in a circulation that can not be reduced to the totality and which nevertheless does not abandon the aspiration to inter-subjectivity, the foundation of both poetics and politics.
Sound, voice, intonation. The words which scroll and suspend for a moment the content to be communicated, carry a strange movement, themselves carried by this movement. There remains only a languorous declining feeling : a speech heard from far.
Something takes place when the sign fails to be intelligible, the muffled rustling of the world is magically amplified without the pomp of the stage.
The artist himself, eager to write a Statement, recalls that he is not necessarily called to be a good speaker.

March / 19

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F O R E W O R D



“Choose a work without a precise subject.
Consider the limits of the language, the vacant place: what is to say.
Conceive art as an expression of means, whose material is the sign, and the sense the
           [direction of the sign.  
Regularly remember the absolute stupidity of making art.
Having cried at least once in front of a work of the spirit.
Reduce the language in order to extend it - oulipien, objecthood, lettrist, Dadaist,
                              [futurist... artistic approach in sum.
Read the History of art as a travel story.
Observe the shape of letters and retain the symmetries.
Beware of any metaphysical nostalgia.
Find in any form (alphabetical, aquatic, political, mathematical,
                       [cartographic, architectural) an incomplete meaning.
Assimilate the pragmatic loneliness of science.
Adopt the romantic attitude of theater.
Say exactly what a speech is not able to say.
Miss sometimes the postmodern garden.”

March / 19

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B L U R R E D   
A L P H A B E T


When Ed Ruscha claims that “words have no size” (or measure), he introduces the idea of the sublime from the indeterminacy of a formal quality, a letter for example takes in the imagination the proportions of a building.
Breaking the contour of words, blurring the edges of letters, is a slowing down of meaning generated by the suspension of a property without which writing and reading is impossible and understanding is hindered.

February / 19

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T H E O R I E S   O F   
S E N S E


The tendency to associate the expression of a feeling with a sort of indistinct grunt comes from a misunderstanding of language. In fact, the expression is the shaping of a matter that requires to be communicated. This formalization can pass through the language, an intelligible statement can account for it.
In some cases the correspondence between words and a feeling suffers an irreparable misadjustment and the emotion is translated into nonverbal language, but much of the emotion’s content is lost in what some authors describe as the ineffable.
Now the ineffable is the disavowal of a missed expression.
This residue, which is not transfered from one individual to another, suddenly becomes interesting. The irreducible emotion, as well as the feeling of the beauty and the sublime, can actually resort to something other than words and yet remain communicable. This is the postulate of inter-subjectivity, which means the inter-communicability of sense as the very foundation of our democracies.
From these meditations I pursue a work that builds bridges between meaning and sense, words and its springs: its motivations.
If I speak of theories of sense it is that a sign, signal, form or gesture, beyond a direct recognition, appeals to the spirit. We find ourselves in a perpetual shift from (perceptual)sense to feeling and from feeling to (semiotic) sense. It may be that the first we receive it as inscription and the second we produce it. The meaning of an ogive or an arc, the correspondence between the letter M and W, what can it be exactly? Beyond the interpretation, there is a request to make sense: to draw a direction which everyone is capable of, without needing to be an artist, without the need to erect a mythology.
My work is therefore to make this operation plausible.
By this means I thwart the paradigm of the artist who often has a sense to reveal / explain from the real: something to communicate.
Go with the other to make sense from what resists to language like emotion, seems to me a moral function that is much more adequate to the artist than that of constructing a discourse that dictates a precise way of seeing, acting or feeling.
Man as a producer of meaning, for better or worse, is the basis of two antinomian regimes: that of knowledge (science) and that of faith (religion), art stands as a third term able to think science and to denude belief.

January / 19

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Let us consider the question of sense as direction.
By discrepancies, by discreet errors,
I write riddles whose solution is unsatisfactory.
They first «make the eye work»
they end up encouraging thought to trace a trajectory.

In this logic I use language (words and signs)
rather as materials than as tools of communication,
and thereby address a critique to advertising strategies
that aim at immediate understanding.

I delay understanding as much as possible,
without falling into cynicism,
by an additional difficulty
capable of giving thought the time to rediscover
its own aspirations.

November / 18

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W H A T   I S   A X I O M A  ?


AXIOMA is the watchword against the sequels of postmodern discourse. The crisis of speech is not a state of things but the work of a critical thought on the relations established between things, in this case on the language and its uses. The whole of society, for the most part, is made up of believers. We see it in its gregarious manifestation at political meetings, in manners and in so-called personal mythologies. But these discourses, even the fundamentals affirmed by tradition, are far from being in crisis. The facade is transformed, it is true, but the structure remains analogous.

As a discrete unit of speech, axioma indicates a degree of language other than the system of signs. Who’s reduced in turn by the idea that language and its verbal form (idiom), are one and the same, and the letter its smallest unit. However, we realize that it is the axiom and not the letter which constitutes the discrete unit and, in successive order, it is not the word but the motivation which gathers the axioms in the expression.

Thus, Axioma is the discrete unity of discourse with regard to sense, where the letter constitutes that which relates to the structure of language. From these meditations we get this chart:

October / 18