Peintre
‘Just as the eye responds with “Green” to an assertion that is too long or too intense of “Red,” in the arts, a cure of “truth” always compensates for an excess of fantasy.’ Paul Valéry in ‘Thoughts on Painting.
Jacob von Uexküll, in his essay ‘Animal Worlds and Human World,’ shows that the forest ‘will not be grasped in its true meaning if we relate it only to ourselves… Its significance is multiplied a hundredfold if we do not limit its relations to the human subject alone but also include the animals.’ For there is no forest as an independent, objectively determined environment. The hunter’s forest is not the painter’s forest nor the roe deer’s. And if I am a roe deer here, it is not to see as the roe deer would, whose perception seems to be limited to blue and green, but rather to pursue the moment that precedes the fiery flash of its leap.”
“Where to Land?” is the title of an essay by Bruno Latour in which he proposes, in response to the deadlocks and anxieties of the contemporary world caused
by climate disruption, to rethink politics and its project by integrating all the “agents” of life on Earth through the notion of “Terrestrials.” Workers, traders,
or homemakers over fifty, just like viruses, bacteria, oceans, bees, or forests, are all terrestrials. For modern humans, who dream of being “masters and possessors
of nature,” urgently discover that what they considered nature—inert and manipulable at will—is, in reality, a collective of agents that generate one another,
reacting to their blind actions in a domino effect, to the point of questioning their own survival. Finding a ground to land on, a forest to breathe (since
air is also a terrestrial), a soil for a world open to diversity and shared with the diversity of Terrestrials without which we dig our own grave. There is
no mysticism in this, but real politics. “One must not confuse the return of the Earth with the ‘return to the land’ of sinister memory”… One must read
Latour.
Those men who aspire to go to Mars should take a walk in the forest. There, they would discover that they are already Martians—that they do not know the Earth they so despise. They no longer see it. They are impatient to escape life, caught in the technological illusion of a world forcibly reduced to code effects. A world without scent, without flavor, other than those of human secretions and the formaldehyde of their machines.
The forest, however, cannot be coded; it is secret, it smells of life and of death, which is called humus. The Martians have forgotten its mushroom paths, which, as Martin Heidegger once said, lead nowhere.
A painting is a surface for meditation. It seems to me that, unlike the mandala, which supports and channels meditation through abstraction toward unity (the mental clarity of pure presence beyond desire, the Nothingness of all things, all meanings), the painting invites meditation through the concretization of diversity (the forest being a paradigm) toward the experience of a purely sensory, ineffable unity where presence and absence merge, releasing desire.
A painting is to be looked at, felt, listened to, touched, tasted. René Daumal, a devoted reader of the Upanishads and the Bhagavad Gita, wrote in Counter-Heaven: Non is my name, non non the name, non non the non. That is the mandala. For the painting, one would have to say: Yes is the ear, yes yes the ear, yes yes the yes.
The forest will outlive us.
Five against one is not a fair match. But the fox is clever.
Our powerlessness in the face of the incompetence, arrogance, and cowardice of our professional politicians regarding the climate emergency leads us to call upon the spirits of the forest. For the spirits of the forest know how to enter dreams and sow humility and rebellion there.
In painting, the image of a doe in the woods has represented the epitome of bad taste for at least a century. Framed above the sideboard, whether an original or a reproduction, a bit yellowed—one could almost eat it up… Flea markets and yard sales are full of them. During a visit to the Salon, while standing in front of a painting depicting a pair of deer in the woods, Degas remarked, “A nice spot to take a piss!…” Alas, whether they’re pissing or not, who can deny the delight of encountering a young roe deer in the forest? And to hell with Degas, I had fun painting it. But I couldn’t ignore the fence.