In this respect artists are like philosophers. What little health they possess is often too fragile, not because of their illnesses or neuroses but because they have seen something in life that is too much for anyone, too much for themselves, and that has put on them the quiet mark of death. But this something is also the source or breath that supports them through the illnesses of the lived (what Nietzsche called health). “Perhaps one day we will know that there wasn’t any art but only medicine.

“This is painting that no longer has any background because the “underneath” comes through: the surface can be furrowed or the plane of composition can take on thickness insofar as the material rises up, independently of depth or perspective, independently of shadows and even of the chromatic order of color (the arbitrary colorist). One no longer covers over; one raises, accumulates, piles up, goes through, stirs up, folds. It is a promotion of the ground, and sculpture can become flat since the plane is stratified. One no longer paints “on” but “under”. These new powers of texture, that ascent of the ground with Dubuffet, have been pushed a long way by informal art, and by abstract expressionism and minimal art also, when they work with saturations, fibers and layers, or when they use tarlatan or tulle in such a way that the painter can paint behind the picture in a state of blindness.”

The word and the history are only paper. But the experience, especially the experience of suffering. Open your eyes and ears, open your door, open the leaves of your table, open your heart, open your homes, your arms. Open what philosophers most often seek to close. Everything but the mouth. Give what they hold back.

Mark Rothko, Untitled (Green, Blue, Green on Blue), 1968

L’émotion ne dit pas « je ». Vous le dites vous-même, on est hors de soi. L’émotion n’est pas de l’ordre du moi, mais de l’événement. Il est très difficile de saisir un événement, mais je ne crois pas que cette saisie implique la première personne. Il faudrait plutôt avoir recours, comme Maurice Blanchot, à la troisième personne, quand il dit qu’il y a plus d’intensité dans la proposition « il souffre » que dans « je souffre ».