The musician, portrait of Suzanne B.
huile sur toile, 100×100 cm, Coll Particulière
Perhaps we should promote a new humanism that no longer relies on the calculative reason born of the Enlightenment. Perhaps we should rethink the famous phrase of Protagoras that modernity has interpreted as an invitation to dominate nature: ‘Man (humankind) is the measure of all things.’ Because this measure may not be geometric or mathematical but rather sensory, sensitive measurement, the measurement of senses and emotions, at play in art and ethics. Therefore, domination is not the right approach…
Beauty, which may be nothing more than the manifestation of this measure, seemsmore relevant than ever to me. The sublime, that feeling of excessiveness which modernity boasted about, may be nothing more than a mystical and morbid dead end. A person is beautiful when they embody and radiate their own measure; they are only sublime when they are lost.