Pictorial introduction: surface vs. window

The surface is what separates the painting from the Albertian window. While the transparency of the latter lets History, the discourse of power and the Word enter into consciousness, the work of the surface, on the contrary, involves the free, indeterminate and affective experience of matter. Not an idealized and inert matter, but a real and concrete one, always singular, whose specific properties will mark out the field of possibilities in which form can come into being.

A variation on a dialectic whose origin is lost in the mists of time, this is the opposition between the supposed transparency of the (let us say) window-discourse and the worldly expression of matter-work. If History allows itself to be represented on the painting, it is precisely because the painting, ut pictura poesis, aspires to the immateriality traditionally attributed to spoken language, whereas, if we are to believe Derrida, we should rather recognize in language the importance of writing, of the trace, but also of the “writing body,” as Derrida tells us. Indeed, despite the fictions born of technophile and technophobe extremisms, there is always someone who writes. Recognizing the importance of the supports, not only of writing but also of memory, leads us to grasp all forms of writing as exteriorizations of human capacities outside the body, “epiphylogenetic” supports, in Stiegler’s learned but precise words, and the very possibility of thought.

However, the notion of writing steers reflection towards the idea of (human) language and of the communicational project associated, in turn, with a disembodied conception of the notion of information. Thus, when we think of the visual arts (and digital art is one of them!), it is necessary to replace the notion of writing with “something” of the order of the artistic gesture. This echoes Deleuze when he says: “A work of art is not an instrument of communication. A work of art has nothing to do with communication. A work of art does not contain the least bit of information. In contrast, there is a fundamental affinity between a work of art and an act of resistance¹.”

1. Gilles Deleuze, « Qu’est-ce que l’acte de création ? », lecture given at the FEMIS on 17 March 1987, in Deux régimes de fous, Paris, Minuit, 2003.↩︎