Since these mysteries are beyond us, let us claim to be pulling the strings
Jean Cocteau - Les mariés de la tour Eiffel


What is writing-painted?


It is the creation of a pictorial scenography; the art of discussion; a dialectic of the body through its disintegration and recomposition; a dialectic of play, of the game of assemblage: a puzzle. I assemble words, images, shapes and colours and then, like an orchestral conductor, I play about with them, ordering them on the canvas and on the page. This is a form of writing by and with the body, the body made writing by the body, words emphasising the anatomy. The body disposes, then proposes.

Start to paint in the same way as a writer sits down to write their memoirs.
But will such painting be dream or autobiography?
Will this virtual object engender reality?
Will this film noir tell us who was the killer or who was killed?
Painting works like a lightning strike to the brain; physically violent, your body is martyred. There is crime here, rape.
The criminal’s fear is the same as the artist’s; they are both terrorised at the idea of being unmasked

My canvases, my paintings are pages of a book that I write using images.
I confront the bare canvas as a writer faces the blank page.

There is a dialectic and dichotomy of the body, of words. The artist, the painter, the writer and the poet cannot live without this fear that racks them; without this demon gnawing at their guts they cannot find true expression; they are driven by this malaise to extirpate it from their body and their soul by all possible means and to confront it simply as a spectator.

Juxtaposition of sentences with no apparent link between them; irregular montages; speaking without giving oneself away; dressing without disguising oneself; exploring the sinuous curves of femininity: poem-paintings. The link between each colour, each curve, each sentence is that of the imagination, the sixth sense.

A woman spectator of men’s vision of women leads men themselves to become spectators of their own vision as seen through the eyes of women.

The paintings provide a parenthesis to our own lives, but are still just a temporary arrangement. One should not seek to copy life, simply attempt to capture its vibrations, to give it another shape and so create an opening into another world.
This imaginary world where the woman dwells cannot be defined as one particular shape, but many.The multiple curves of the imagination are where fecund, life-giving woman takes shelter.
Images and words have always made good bedfellows.

I never paint from models. Models distract me.

I discover the painting as I proceed. I paint and write at the same time; words and images, colours and phrases.

I should find a pictorial form that transforms painting into writing and writing into painting.

All of these images are figurines of one’s personality, reflections of oneself.

I THE WOMAN

In this first scenography the protagonists gather for a conversation...on and off the beat, evoking self, evoking comfort. Come to the drawing room to sip exotically flavoured tea and nibble Proustian madeleines in an explosion of lively colours for a greater affirmation of self.
All these women seem well brought-up, taught to conform since childhood. But these are not sexed bodies, but symbols of sexuality.

She confides like she has never dared before. Freud had forgotten that this creature perched atop her high-heeled shoes is responsible for perpetuating the species.
This big-hearted feline wishes to seize a new chance to fall in love again, to no longer live
on nostalgia for the happiness of paradise lost, but to live her life to mythical proportions.

Sit down and tell me all. Reveal to me the reflections of your deepest sensations, of your lived experience. Fear not, for your subconscious will do it all, reveal everything and then erase it.
This same subconscious that will cast the woman in the role of mother, this mother who will bring children into the world and who will always be there, a source of motherly love.
You see, it is only instinct, nothing but animal instinct that determines the woman’s choice. Animal and protective.

Remember Genesis. Join the seventh art and watch yourself, prisoner of the hearth, and then regurgitate this nightmare. Is a woman’s gift not magnificent?

Ah! To thumb your nose at all those who, without knowing it, mutilate themselves so that they become nothing more than consumer objects. Like a tasty dish, a woman should let herself be savoured with a gaze.

Blood-red lips spell DANGER. At the DANGER sign, watch out for the wild animal on the prowl.

Settle yourself comfortably on the blood-red lips of desire, so that the taste of the colours rises in your mouth; cascading dreams, falling loins, double breasts, azure milk, wiggle your toes...
Careful holy woman, you’re making us lose our heads.

“Why do we consider women to be deep?
Because we can never get to the bottom of them;
Women are not even flat” Nietzsche.

A woman is her own victim, whom she controls with an iron hand, keeping herself on a short leash.

Here are the Eves on the canvases and the Adams spectators.
Ah! These cruel seductive goddesses who, like Artemis, draw their lovers into an eternal chase, remaining ever out of reach.

They spurt from an explosion of liquid colour.
Do not all of her functional parts provide the cadence to all of our desires, the rhythm to all of our appetites?

Tell me, what woman would remain insensitive to the voice of an abandoned man?

Let us give this innate fantasy the right to existence.

Women know how to surpass themselves in love, even to the point of martyrdom.

You seem to know me, you think you know me, but you do not see my thoughts.

I send you my final words.

The subject is worked, reworked, handled, folded, unscrewed, reconstituted and assembled before the place of all resonances.

The subject breaks its way through to settle here, before diffracting across the canvas.

The air is full of straight lines which criss-cross the body-space to become simply a movement under a halo of light. You can see better in broad daylight can you not?

“Seeing is understanding, judging, transforming, imagining, forgetting, losing control, being or disappearing”. Paul Eluard

We should be just like certain animals, not seeing in broad daylight, but at twilight, in the night of the heart.

The human anatomy must be made to dance.

Diamonds and Spades: we make sense only in relation to our opposite.





II LIFE LOVE HAPPINESS


Love is feline. It remains unpredictable for the human being and yet so close to the jungle in which we live.

It is because we give our love no chance to exist that we desire it so violently.

When one woman comes to sit at your table, don’t forget that the other one awaits you in your bed.

Life should be like a painter’s palette; the brush is washed in clear, transparent water each time the colour is changed.

She had been extraordinarily loved, but it was only through his silences that he let her know this.
I have always lived against the stream.

To live a complete love story, should we ourselves be complete or incomplete?
And if we ourselves are complete then can this love story complete itself? Or, on the contrary, is it because we ourselves are incomplete that such a love story can complete itself?

But nobody will reproach us for having seized our opportunity.

For when one is in love one writes sentences that have no end. One must continue to write, to write further than one’s heart, so that the sentence will never end and we will not have had the time to insert all of the punctuation. There is no punctuation in love; it must be left there where our heart guides us.

The title reveals the story constructed by the painting. Without it nothing.

Love must have a price in order to last, but the heart is free, without known value, varying from hour to hour, from place to place and from season to season. The heart is indiscernible and yet you must put a price on it, for there is always a price to pay.


Our love cannot be erased and we do not have the right to flee this happiness that is love.

“Here are fruits, flowers, leaves and branches. And here is my heart which beats only for you.” Verlaine.


Life is like a stage play,
Our role changes according to season,
The important thing is to play it well.


They were both of them alone in this world; that is what drew them closer together.

Fidelity supposes love.

In love, truth only serves to break up.

Love is not a chimera, it seeks to be the compass of those who are apt to see and hear it.

Sincerity, love between two beings, that is the essential.
Love is not something you can sign for on the dotted line.

Your blood runs in my veins. This red, full of pain and passion, that signals the proximity of desire.

How easy to be happy with a light heart!

The only thing you can do in love is to keep your balance.

Do not seek a double for your withered love, but let time do its work, so that it may rebuild a little nest in another corner of your heart.

Seek, encounter, win, lose – such is our relation to life.

I use colour as I use feelings – pure.

Love is a cocktail of feelings ready to explode at any moment.

At a particular moment in our life, before it is too late, before our image starts to wane and our gaze turn from tomorrow to yesterday, a decision must be made. Some opt for the wide open sea with the wind in their sails, while others decide to paddle. Ah, the soaring sail, the breath of freedom, with its dangers, its laziness and its new beauty that becomes beauty only through its charm and its novelty. The breath of the wind, words, words blown by the wind.

She cloaks herself in desires and gives herself a present, an object of desire, yet without belonging to it.

Life is a question of survival. Like a leopard, one’s calculations must be swift and action violent.

Madness fascinates me, attracts me and yet scares me. Must I be a schizophrenic to be an artist?

“Happiness is the shape taken by approaching sorrow” Charles Baudelaire.


He was so perfectly discreet, so moulded by an indefinable silence and calm, that there was nothing but an aura of intangibility.

“The greatest thing in the world is to know how to be with oneself.” Montaigne.

This mix of restraint and giving of oneself. Not looking ahead but giving, giving of oneself, for do not all these tokens have but one goal, to serve love. The art of economy, of not dilapidating one’s person and rendering these simple little things sublime.

Love is a business of tropes, a palimpsest of loved faces.

The painting and the spectator know each other without ever having met. For they share the same characteristics: instinctive, nomadic and rebellious.

“I is another” Arthur Rimbaud


In order to fight against the rhizomes you must first of all be in the work of art, then in your life, for it is the rhizomes that will transform your environment.


“Reason is intelligence exercising itself.
Imagination is intelligence in a state of erection.” Victor Hugo


Nothing is immutable, everything can transform itself. The gambler gambles with life, his life, holding it between his fingers. It is an extreme pleasure to feel it in his hand. Luck is his companion. Together they will build their game, tomorrow’s game.

Real freedom lies in nonsense, in swimming against the stream, in being too early or too late, not forward enough, too far behind, to the left instead of to the right.

Beauty is there to be gazed at. If you live next to it then you drown it.
Let us protect springtime happiness.
Glide on the breeze that blows from who knows where.

You are a sad fool if your own pleasure and amusement is dependant upon others’ permission.

He who risks everything upon signs, straight lines, directions and meanings; it is a business of tropes. Love is imprisonment, chains and restraints.

My telly is blue: it is a palimpsest of loved faces.

Can a man tame a woman without controlling her?
Madness is in colour.

Love here is only a palimpsest of choice morsels, of parts loved. The first piece of writing had to be erased in order to write a new story, and so love becomes this collector of the unreal. But for this to happen the biographical “I” and the epic “it” had to leave everything behind, get away from the subject, then join together in imaginary bodies.

You men are the bows and the women arrows in this projection. Love the flying arrow but do not forget yourself, the bow. Look and love.

Time: miracles are not the preserve of the lucky, rather they are for those for whom time does not count.

Confuse drawing and writing. Words are the kernel of creation, itself rhizome which pierces the canvas before flowering in an explosion of liquid colours. These unlimited drops are then swept by the winds before sprouting ideas. Their daughter is imagination, suspended like a set of scales, its trays loaded with interlaced desires which snake through the body to flow into the visual which is the image. Words thus become the sap which nourishes heaven’s tree. Like new wine, this sap will be placed in eternal vases.





III PAIN

While one of us played the other suffered!

Passion is no match for time.

To endure being torn apart by conflicting passions.

That which makes others smile weakly pierces me to the heart.

Even in love we are not huntresses, but victims tracked by passion’s demon.

Even my own ideas explode with the force of a lightning bolt.

How could one not read in her eyes that she was elsewhere, listening only to the anxiety that devoured her.

Only the first steps are decisive, and the slightest ripping of the soul will only be partially healed.

A fire which burns but that does not go out.
A fire which activates, which pushes the locomotive.
The starter: for without it there is no existence that is worth living.

It burns from inside and consumes one’s morale.
Boredom wears me down, like a Sunday infusing within me.

Let reign this unwrinkled immorality, this cosmetic immorality.

Now I have only my pain to keep me company. But what a waste of time it is to wish to kill yourself when you are already dead.

Do you believe that just because we are not prepared for happiness we should get used to unhappiness? Or that just because we have not been used to unhappiness that we are unable to prepare ourselves for happiness?

Can happiness be solid without prior knowledge of pain and suffering?

I have learned that you must first experience unhappiness to be happy. If that is true is it because we always desire the opposite of what we already have?

It is a perpetual challenge that we set ourselves, for there is no progression without it. We always need new objectives and dissatisfaction remains the best stimulus. Unhappiness prepares us, perhaps, for happiness.

If you wish to progress towards new objectives then hold onto a certain need for dissatisfaction.

Leave for a sweeter return or leave never to return?

There are always certain warnings which we fail to notice. I so wanted to keep on gazing at you that I did not hear the water flowing beneath my feet.

We live in the age of the victim; it is more reassuring, and as victims we help each other.

Your behave as if gazing at a mirror image of yourself.

Do you really believe that these plants will constrict and then choke?

We spend our lives seeking another, our other half. Sometimes we spend our whole lives with another without knowing what we expect from the other.

And yet his affection slowly declined.

Having wanted to live with him to endure living with him, it is a need for suffering that consumes me. To no longer exist except through fear and pain so as not to let oneself die, and it is with pleasure that I invite you to step onto the stage. What traces of our ashes will remain from this Machiavellian happiness?

Slowly we clipped our wings. Why have we stopped feeling emotions together? Now I no longer listen to you. I think of other things. Has life become a juxtaposition of monologues? I no longer hear you. The fermented discord turns bitter.

I fucked your mouth.
Kisses which suck at your soul. One must temper one’s fidelity to keep one’s freedom.

I still feel this oppressive atmosphere suspended above the landscape of my heart, of my body-landscape, a caesura between the real world and my own world. I should make the coloured vapours of my feelings rise until my imaginary world masks my eyes. See beyond the undulations of the warm vapours of the sun’s rays then lie down on a body-landscape and go to sleep.

“He who walks over their pain, walks towards loftiness.” Goethe

The divergent face-off. We force ourselves to sum up our lives in a few colours, in a few sketched lines, even though a laugh, a tear or a simple turn of our head would suffice.

Life is an heroic epic with starring roles. When we settle for dreams we always pay a very high price.

If you take the risk of transforming our relationship, take care, for in turn it may well have the power to transform you.

To these big nostalgia-diffusing mirrors.
Go there where you will not find me.
I have become other.
Dry your tears.
Walk with your head held high.
It will be a fight without weapons,
An adult’s game,
For a bare truth.
The other will not be me,
And I will have become another.

I am free to no longer be, but simply sense myself.
Sense that I am free,
Free to be what I was not,
Maybe.
But she who was not,
Should be.


One should never forget that a painting is always a reflection, a mirror, an enchanted mirror which will never steam up. So should one get rid of this mirror’s silvering so that one can no longer see the various representations of one’s personality, so that one is no longer troubled by oneself? But beware if ever I acquire importance in my eyes, for that is when I shall be nothing but a kind of mirror.
Mirrors make rooms seem larger. This is well known, you know. They only add perspectives to existing perspectives. They have no future. Their world is the past.





IV THE TRAGEDY

Our feelings cause us to poison our blood.

Love is finished when it is no longer possible to go back. That is how one realizes. One has broken up without even noticing.

From the cradle to the grave our life is switched to automatic pilot and you need courage, superhuman courage to change course.

Just like an actor, a painter is somehow struck by a curse. They are never alone with themselves, but are possessed by what they have lived, are living and will live.

Pick up one’s loves to start again, to relive a sensation with feelings that seem already dead, to live a drama in three acts: from presence to absence for fresh performances.

If a man gives himself to you with the first glance, take care, for in the moment after he will be nothing but a gaunt wolf.

Our dependence upon the need to be loved causes us to lose our very substance.

The subject breaks in to stay then diffracts, returning to the core, to the centre, to the heart of the volcano. The subject which has been worked then becomes a place of resonance. Feed oneself with a desire for fusion.

When an idea that has been seized by an artist is not immediately reproduced there is a tragedy, for the creation is sometimes beyond the artist’s will.

Is not each change fertile ground for upsets. For it was from chaos that the earth was formed, and it is in disorder that life is made and remade. Change is like a seductive woman who would trigger a tragedy.

The release of words, these words which in turn become images.

The sound of passing steps followed by a long silence, heavy and cumbersome, which bores into your eardrums until it strikes you down. I fell with a dull thud. I am cold.

A release for our suffocating soul, a freeing of the tension of our fettered feelings, this is where our dreams get us. This truthful liar, this hyphen between the real world and our hidden feelings. But painting exists to offer us a second life, that of a spectator to our torments.

The projection of images onto the canvas, which is the projection of our dreams, allows us to escape our cramped bodies, and our bourgeois-delimited days are no longer subjected to the forces of reason. The eye leads us towards new continents. They open up the door to a certain giddiness, where our identity may become dissolved.

I must fix the various images on the canvas so as to see the film of my dreams surge forth. Then, just like a stage play, I must reorganise everything in a theatrical élan.

We cannot escape reality, and under this atmospheric pressure the dream reveals itself to us in new ways.

The rules are already set, all there is left for us to do is to move up and down, down and up, left to right and right to left. The world is only a mathematical problem. It is difficult to obey our own will for we are possessed, slaves devoid of thoughts and movement in our paradise lost.

You must affirm and confirm the independence of your essence, and deny the heredity of all acquired characteristics so that you may conquer new worlds.

You were not afraid to admit to having averted your gaze all these years. From childhood you knew that your passionate temperament would make you suffer. As a reaction to this you used your nerves to truss up your emotions.

Contrary to the average man, the artist can transmute their torments in their pictorial works, in their own particular form of durable writing;

Anonymousness enables one to achieve that which one has forbade oneself for so long.

Coming and going, starting one thing then another, never finishing anything, always going on to something else, doing this or that, never entirely committing oneself, never reaching the end, always feeling that time never stops; pursuing it, outpacing it, overtaking it, never stopping, always on the move, running with multifaceted idleness. And that is how twenty years of life rush by in an eternal whirlwind, in a constant agitation lacking any outside or intimate goal.

Can the correct measurement be made on a set of scales, or are the scales themselves set by the measurement, with reasonable correctness the only arbiter.

The discrepancy of the inner world is linked to the outer world only by one’s passions.

Suffering is the plough that furrows the soul. This painful act is necessary for an improved harvest. Then, next autumn, at the blessed time of the gods, we will pick new fruits.





V THE DREAM


Life is like middle-class cuisine where kisses are given as freely as a child hands over its marbles. Women are indifferent to everything except prestige.

We dream as we paint, the body becoming a landscape. We paint like we write, to escape from the world, and that is how we become painter and writer, without wishing it and without knowing it, simply because we have finally let our life live. We have let our subconscious wander across the sandy swell and foamy dunes.

Strip this itinerant madness bare. Stay true to oneself, don’t be distracted by the mood of the moment. Slide into imaginary bodies.

The floating body reconstitutes itself, reconfiguring itself from disfiguration. It is suspended in the present of the future imperfect. It is the love of words.

The collector of the unreal must efface the subject, leaving everything behind, getting away, before returning to themselves to slide into imaginary bodies.

We must moult, just as snakes do, so as to be reborn,. We must free ourselves from the yoke of the religious and moral scruples that torment us and follow our heart’s élan so as to be free to be what we have not been.

Do not think, but obey your senses,
Do not understand, but feel.

I lose myself in my thoughts as in my dreams. When I awake, all of these stories are no longer mine. Only this shaken-up cranium is mine, which is perhaps why it seems damaged on certain mornings, hammered with bumps and dents, impacts from the shock of images.

If anyone ever knew what went through my head in the space of twenty-four hours they would consider me worthy to be straitjacketed.

I don’t want to tell stories, I just want you to come yesterday.

She had finally found a way of expressing everything she had to give and that nobody had wanted up until then.

I will go to the end of my dreams, there where reason is no more.

Ah! These romantics who continue to dream, to dream ceaselessly of heroically shaped ideas.

We paint while we dream, we offer fantastic possibilities to our constricted lives. We paint like we write, to escape from the world.

Make the tender and colourful vapours of our barely hatched feelings rise until an imaginary world masks my eyes from the real world.

Dream until all our senses are exhausted.

These shadows that move with people, these shapes, these silhouettes which follow them everywhere, these moving traces, who are you? Whom should we speak to? To the horizontality or to the verticality?

Live in another life where words would not have the same meaning, where we would understand each other without speaking.

The work of a painter or writer is that of a filibuster or pirate. Everything depends upon how you tackle things, the strategy of the moment, for not all ships are on the same seas at the same moment. Tackling words, breath, intake of breath, intonation, vocabulary and image in order to fill the emptiness.

I should develop a new pictography interweaving texts and drawings.
The drawing, the visual part, and the text as a sub-layer that can only be detected using X-rays.
Drawing is pictography: the image and the visual are the depths of the spirit.
And writing exists to underline a colour, a curve, a straight line.
Confusing drawing with writing, blending writing into drawing. Drawing is the candle that is held by the candleholder of writing. The lit fuse will make everything be reborn and light up the foundations, without which the image would not exist.





CONCLUSION


I keep this diary because I do not know what I should admit or reveal. I write and I paint. That is all.

The thing to do is to show what we see, not what we know.

Why do we seek in front of others, out loud?

To be present, emptiness must settle all around until it disappears.

There are bodies which do not speak. They must cross dress in order to exist. Such a disguise will determine their comportment, their way of thinking. These creatures inhabit our suburbs.

It is the imagination that gives space and depth to the painting.

The door is the morning mist.

Follow your inner traveller, the one who is always far away and alone.

What is creation? It is thinking what others have thought about the same subject. Then you must forget it and make it live again, for nothing gets lost, everything rebuilds itself. Otherwise, with all this concrete, our planet would have dropped out of orbit.

Be not an anchor but a mast, the guardian of space.