Homunculus

Homunculus

huile sur toile, 100×100 cm

Paracelsus, in his “De natura rerum,” provides the recipe for creating the homunculus, a small man to whom alchemical artifice grants life. Neurobiology, with Penfield’s homunculus modified by contemporary investigation, sees it as the neural projection of the human body, where different proportions in the brain reflect the varying degrees of importance of specific limbs or organs in motor or sensory functions. Here, this homunculus can be all of that and more because the painter has discovered it conceived in the forest. “Painting is a mental object that compels me to see it through its own gaze, meaning I must strip it of its references to see it according to the painter’s vision. My thought then enters into what was thought within it. An infinite task, for this object is neither a statement nor the key to a truth that it can make me access. No, it is only itself: merely the trace of a thought that makes me think.” Bernard Noël in “Journal du regard.”