“The sun is something that cannot be reproduced, but merely represented,”
said Cézanne. It is only by translating our own sensations, by representing
ourselves (according to Maurice Denis) that we can create new beauty.
Creating a new presence, a new reality … This is where representation
differs from reproduction (academic drawing as understood in the 19th
century or photography).
•
In its inexhaustibility, every motif is beyond capturing. This is all the more
true of the motif of a living, pulsating phenomenon. Yet it can be represented
– its presence that is beyond capturing can be depicted. Individual
paintings are not just fixations but also imprints, traces of a living phenomenon;
in its sequencing, the serial form enables both a fixating gaze
and the experience of life, of motion.
•
The arguments used in the popular rejections of painting today, which
aim to dismiss it as something obsolete or to relegate it to the sphere of
decorative and archaic artisanship, are not tenable. Painting does not
compete against other media: its vitality makes its language untranslatable,
and the space it creates cannot be recreated by any other art form.
•
A painting is living tissue. It inherently bears all the characteristics of all
living things – including, or above all, transience, which is carved on the
painter’s consciousness as he or she conceives a work and chooses the
technique and the material. The artist faces numerous dilemmas: which oil
to choose, poppyseed or linseed; the latter will yellow, the former crack-
le … Unlike a poem or other, more recent forms of art, a painting is not
reproducible. Its life is as fragile as a butterfly wing and its membrane
alive until it decomposes into colorful dust.
Yet I repeat: A painting is living tissue.

Translation: Tamara Soban