“Il faut être absolument moderne.”
“One must be absolutely modern”
A. Rimbaud
“Tant fait l’homme qu’à la fin il disparait”
“A man does so much that eventually he disappears”
R. Queneau
The perspective plane moves to the forefront, we see it approaching slowly but inescapably like a zoom-in tending towards abstraction. We are now in front of the paintings. The figures begin to float in the background losing their texture. They merge, in our retina, with the grid that structured them. The characters in the canvas pickaxe tenaciously the misguided idea that painting ought to be a window into the outside world. But in reaching the frame of the window, the backdrop still isn’t satisfied, and keeps marching against us. The 20th century is born: it hits us, tramples us, and eventually absorb us with its shift from window painting to space itself. Light and thought now master the game, they surround us and leave us stupefied in this new drawn world, which in some points is but merely conceptualized and recalculated. We finally witness the temptation of the artwork to disappear completely, to dissolve, to disintegrate, and hide from reality and in the world like one of Morandi’s shelves. The instant appears, that moment in vision when the shelves aren’t there anymore, when everything has dissolved yet something remains: the echo of an image, crystallised in the eye and in the mind, perhaps a reminiscence of having once been alive. An iconic replica which repeats endlessly; we discover that the image has outlived its own dissolution. There she is once again, steadfast in her physical inconsistency and creating a paradox: it’s inexistent in the real world and projected into a parallel world, it features outlines but no depth, and crafts its own tailored notion of shape. The image escapes us, it cuts, paste, replicates; we have to keep it still, try to re-establish a sense of belonging and property to it. Stability is essential, guiding stars are vital. But in believing this we entrust a lie, we put our faith in stars which haven’t glowed in years; such is the life we live, lit up by a light that tricks us into believing there is something at the distance. The real bond is with something which, with Sartre, I’d define as imagerie, rather than image or imaginaire. The difference lies in the former’s impalpability, an image partially rooted into the fuzzy agency of the thought process, an agency which is dream-like or remembered, maybe a sediment of memory or perhaps a recollection of an era that never was. There certainly have been new attempts at art making and allegiances to new paradigms. Net Art had already foreseen the future exploring a collective idea of intangibility, one that could be reprogrammed and regenerated. But this is a new era, one with a textured desire to find and feel its own physicality, aware of its disembodied and impalpable daily routine, and riddled with guilt. This is a new era with new locations where thought can abstract itself, with new resources for visual language, and within which the spaces to conserve and collect can be reimagined. It’s a new era and one must absolutely be there.
