1. The Labyrinth in the Maze

«To all appearances, the artist acts as a medium, who from the labyrinth beyond time and space, seeks his way towards a clearing »

Marcel Duchamp

This site not only presents a painter’s work, but a practice of art which can lead to a theory on images. Inspired by Aby Warburg¹, I find the hidden or ignored content of art much more stimulating that discourses on aesthetics. To the best of my ability, I aspire to continue Warburg’s pursuit of what he called “Iconology” that is, searching and questioning a content which, as we shall see, can guide the evolution of art.

¹ Aby Warburg observed that within Renaissance art there were many traces of ancient beliefs or ghosts that became “symptoms” of unease, or of a sort of schizophrenia, within our culture. « The interpretation of historical phenomena becomes, in itself, a diagnostic of occidental man struggling to heal from his contradictions and to find his own vital abode ». « What makes sense in a culture is the symptom, the unthought-of, the anachronism of this culture ». In an exhibition called Mnémosyne, he becomes himself an artist, exposing or revealing somehow the content or space or the gap between different images. This gap acts like an « engram »: (the energy accumulated after a psychological shock, which can later release itself on another image or phenomena). « The tropological attitude that he adopts is a mental state permitting an observation of the change of image function in status nascendi »

Bibliography :
Giorgio Agamben  Aby Warburg A science without a Name
P.- Alain Michaud Aby Warburg et l’image en mouvement
Didi Huberman L’image survivante

 

What is contained in my latest paintings is the path of the labyrinth within a maze. Contrary to a current misunderstanding, the labyrinth is not a maze. It is unicursal and therefore one does not get lost in it, but rather, one finds oneself in it. In fact, there are those that assert that to really find oneself one must first get lost. The labyrinth represents the path followed by Theseus, thanks to Ariadne’s thread, leading out of the maze from its centre. What is unsettling is that no one is agreement on what might be the maze’s configuration and so the image of the labyrinth is always presented out of context.

By chance, I discovered that the labyrinth, along with the maze, was formed by deconstructing a knot: This knot which becomes undone even if one cannot find the ends of the string composing it can be called a Gordian knot ² It can symbolize the unity of the whole. Two apparently foreign symbols are thus united. The construction of the labyrinth, in one fell swoop, offers a solution to the problem of the Gordian knot that has become undone. (See 2 The Construction of the Labyrinth, or my book The Genesis and Geometry of the Labyrint³.)

My recent paintings use this construction of the maze containing the labyrinth. The maze is no longer a pre-established place from which one must escape. It becomes a pattern that simultaneously forms itself with the labyrinth as one tries to find links and bonds that lead to the unity of the world. Since I use holographic film, the luminosity and aspects of the film change according to where the observer is positioned (see 7 Holography). The effect is that the paintings can evoke the maze of a lighted city flown over at night as well as the internet’s web or that of a network of neurons. Within this network, the labyrinth can either be distinctly underlined or fused with the design of the maze, where it can no longer be distinguished. It is suggested therefore, that even if it exists within the maze in which we live, its path is impossible to recognise and reveals itself as a construction of the mind.

But why seek this path? Symbolically it represents the sybilline answer to the questions: who am I? Where do I come from? Where am I going? One can, of course, ask oneself where this answer comes from. It becomes tempting to follow the Sybille or to lure her out of her cave. For me the discovery of the maze was the fruit of a long process which could not stop there. The labyrinth’s path, similar to a mandala in a well-organised pantheon, is difficult to translate in the context of daily, prosaic routines. However, when constructing different paths within the maze, I often have the impression of following a sort of ritual⁴and discovering my hidden self, for in a certain way, we are defined by the path we follow. When I organise a network, it affects me in the same way as it does the philosopher Giles Deleuze who says: “I try to explain that things, that people, are composed of very diverse lines, and they don’t necessarily know on which line they are, nor where to direct the line they are tracing, in short there is a whole geography in people, with hard lines, soft lines, escaping lines……to leave, to escape, is to trace a line….to run away is to trace a line, many lines, a whole cartography. One only discovers worlds by a long, broken escape.”

⁴ How to define the image in order to accept that its elaboration can constitute a ritual? There are so many and varied aspects of the image that it is not easy to define. In order to limit the scope of investigation, Marie José Mondzain in (penser l’image,) utilizes the relation “provenance/destination”. By knowing where the image comes from, one becomes able to convey its nature.

« The nature of the image is fundamentally paradoxal: Production of the subject, the image leads the subject himself who produced it. » « The very act of producing images is inseparable from the gestures creating the signs. They In turn allow the processes of identification and separation without which there would be no subject »

One must then choose between the image as operator or the image as object. Because of its relation with the subject, we must opt for the first choice.

« Each time one reduces the image to become only an object; one affects the destination of the subject himself »
M. José Mondzain offers the following hypothesis:
« Between our provenance and our destination, it is the image that positions itself as the historic operator of the mediation and producer of answers » Thus Mondzain does not speak of images in particular nor of images as objects, but rather of their destination.   “A destination inevitably undetermined” which is nothing else but its own random opening »
Mondzain not only considers the place of the image “in the subjective reflection but the image on a trajectory which envisions a genesis and a targeted unfolding…targeted according to an end. » As with the icon, what characterizes the image is then, « The essence of the gaze laid upon it »
I would not know how to completely summarize nor do justice to Mondzain’s text. This text demands to be reread and pondered. It seems to me the image she speaks about is an image which becomes internalized, altering and evolving in its own realm under the influence of a commerce of gazes (the tile of one of Mondzains books); an image which manifests itself in art like a trace left in the wake of a trajectory. There would then finally be a link between all possible images, a network of images in which one could decipher different paths leading either to involution or evolution. In my modest spyglass, I see a maze of images containing labyrinthic paths. Mondzain text not only helps to better convey how the making of an image can constitute a ritual, it also offers a model to the path I followed and which I try to understand and describe.

Henri Michaux had a similar experience while drawing under the influence of drugs:

“ Here only a line, a line that bursts into a thousand aberrations… the whole of me had to pass by this line… by the same path, obliged to pass, me, my thoughts, and the vibration.”In following these lines, which split the knot in two, I discover myself also divided in two. One path corresponds to the observer in me, the being which is the surprised witness of my own life, while the other reminds me of my existence, often incomprehensible or absurd like a Samuel Beckett character. Thus, representation in painting can modify the questions we ask ourselves. Reciprocally, the new questions that evolve produce forces that give way to form. A dynamic relationship establishes itself between form and content and new developments can always be predicted. (See 5 Content and Form).

Recently, I realised that the image of the construction of the labyrinth corresponds to the Khora: the creation of the world as images of ideas described by Plato in the Timaeus (see 8 Khora). Thus, to my great surprise, it is as if the path of the labyrinth kept its promises even graphically and led the painter to a particular theory of images that is the answer to: “what do I paint?” It also leads to who I am since, according to Plato, we are images. As Mircea Eliade predicted, “The image waits for the achievement of its own meaning.” Obviously this image is not something that one can appropriate like a slice of cow conserved in formaldehyde by Damian Hirst. Rather, it shows the path of the labyrinth in a new light, similar to a set of hermeneutic circles linked together. The image of man finally presents itself as a path.

n° 16 Petite musique des sphères