The literary field, born from the language that shapes society, a product of our logos, permeates every interstice of human activity, including the production of images and sound or visual performances. Because of its essential function of illumination and communication, the literary field is therefore more powerful than the visual arts. This literary field possesses its own artistic objects: novels, poems, plays... They are defined as artistic because of an artificial distance, a distance constructed from the referents of reality, for the sake of narrative structure and through an openness to polysemy. This is a distortion, a reinterpretation of our natural language, but without changing its nature. Proposals of visual arts objects or events do not require these artifices, this sidestep, this addition of polysemy to obscure the meaning while deepening the subject, because visual, musical, and spectacular objects inherently contain an element of obscurity directly linked to their physical and sensory nature; they are events. This is the fundamental difference between the written text of a play and its staging. The pictorial or theatrical realm is by nature characterized by obscurity, complexity, instability, and unpredictability; it is alive. In contrast, the literary realm tends to illuminate, to fix and stabilize, aiming for a form of rigidity.
Words can precede the image or performance if used to conceive or articulate a project before its realization—it's worth noting that a conceptual artwork will not go beyond this initial filter, which proceeds from the mental to the verbal, period. Conversely, words will also emerge after the image or performance has materialized: commentary, insights, testimonials of shared understanding, and buzz.
This underscores the essential nature of the literary field; it even has its own artistic output, and any production of images or performances must necessarily consider its relationship to the verbal. The practice of a manual art such as painting, for example, whose origins date back more than 45,000 years, will inevitably be illuminated by the literary field, to which it belongs despite itself, given that words permeate all areas of human activity as soon as it becomes socialized.
The challenge here is to define, within the pictorial or artistic field in the broadest sense, today, what figuration can, what it should be. Who can call themselves a figurative artist? A term that carries almost a hint of political commitment for a painter, but a strange flavor for a musician.
A detour is necessary. I'm opening the literary hood; we're going to take it apart. What, for example, does the distinction between content and form entail? As far as language is concerned, it's simple: content is meaning, significance, the dictionary definitions; and form is the sounds, phonemes, and/or signs of handwritten, printed, or digital writing. In the pictorial, performance, or musical fields, it's less clear. As far as form is concerned, at first glance everything seems fine since painting, music, and dance are precisely visual and sonic forms, movements in space. Between forms in the plural and form in the singular, the differences in meaning will be a matter of nuances to be discussed, perhaps evoking the shift from the particular to the general, but the lexical field hasn't changed. On the other hand, if I try to define the essence of an image, a choreography, or a piece of music, it's dizzying. We can't see the essence. Because the analogy with the literary field no longer works. Is the essence contained within a coded mechanism of reference to reality—symbolic, allegorical, metaphorical, or narrative? Must we go as far as the referent, to an external reality evoked by the object or the visual event? Is there any figure of speech that can account for the essence, express what has meaning and what doesn't? Does the object or event enter into a communication framework, addressing itself to the literary field, in a cry for help, to reach the meaning(s) as that literary field understands them? Or, conversely, must the content escape this framework and reside at the physical heart of the form, in the very materials of the sound or visual object as pure sensory stimulations, simply and purely contemplative, so as to evoke feeling without the need for words, to be consumed in reverent silence? These are all questions that will remain unanswered. This digression, however, indicates that we have strayed from the path and that non-literary arts unfold in another dimension as non-verbal performances. Even if it is obvious that words eventually catch up with them because, it must be repeated, words slip in everywhere and at all times, since they are an essential social bond. This text itself is a demonstration of that.
What is demonstrated is that figuration belongs neither to content nor to form; the distinction does not hold true in the visual arts. This duality is a concept that belongs to the literary field and to it alone.
Having set aside the discussion of content and form, we can now address another misunderstanding that particularly plagues painters: the distinction between figuration and abstraction.
The term "abstraction" appears, in the context of painters' practices, as the symptom of a strange malaise that emerged at the beginning of the 20th century within the literary field of art criticism—that is to say, just the other day, at a point in the history of European painting when it had compromised itself, if not gone astray, in the 19th century, precisely within this literary field, through a dangerous flirtation with illustration, with history, with academic and administrative fads, in a stifling, typically Parisian, verbose atmosphere. At the time, it was referred to as academic art. When the image became edifying, subject to the hierarchies of literary meaning, it ultimately extinguished its sensory brilliance. A healthy reaction against this stagnation occurred in Europe, but it still took a whole century of modern art to digest the matter, searching for the right formula in every direction, from Impressionism to Nihilism, passing through a dizzying array of "-isms." A struggle that risked a technical knockout by default, abandoning all sensory dimensions (conceptual art, digital art) after having overused them to the point of nausea (abstraction, materialism). Painting, undoubtedly the art form that has suffered most from this loss of bearings, nevertheless survived a 20th century that threatened to be fatal to it. At the end of the last century, it was declared dead, yet it is entering the 21st century strengthened by the dazzling and high-risk acceleration of its long history. The concept of abstraction in art is a huge misunderstanding stemming from the contamination of painting by the literary field.
Because using the term "abstraction" in art, in opposition to figuration and narrative, is a misuse of a concept that designates the act of thinking about one or more qualities of a concrete object in order to form an intellectual representation of it, and which also defines the product of this operation. It is the act of considering a quality, a relationship, separately, independently of the objects one perceives or imagines. This is the philosophical and psychological meaning of the term. It therefore involves a distance created by thought or the mind, a mental distance from concrete reality in order to produce a result. Now, if I accept that drawing or painting is a way of thinking with the hand, that this practice operates within a mental distance from concrete reality, that this practice produces the result of thought on a physical support, then we must admit that it is abstraction, abstract art by definition. And that there is no reason to oppose this abstract art to another that would be figurative or narrative.
Because all figurative painting is abstraction. The opposition between the two concepts is a literary device that has no meaning in the visual arts. Abstraction in art is this natural mechanism of transposition, representation, and processing of reality through the senses, the nervous system, and the intelligence of those who manipulate pictorial objects linked to this reference reality—objects intended for the senses, the nervous system, and the intelligence of others. Abstraction and representation actually designate the same process. The distance from reality presents an infinite elasticity, just like dreams; the Surrealists extensively exploited this register. But there has been semantic deception because what has been retained in the history of painting as abstraction can be analyzed in the opposite way to what the term is supposed to mean. So-called abstract painting champions an unfiltered literalness, therefore devoid of abstraction. It abolishes the distance from its object; it is its own object in a perfect mathematical reflexivity, reflecting nothing but itself. It is a direct grasp without reflection, without pointing toward another dimension. Color declares that it is color, line that it is line, period. So-called abstract painting is a treasure hunt whose traces indicate no clue. Or hardly any.
Kazimir Malevich (1878-1935), a painter who originated what was later—and erroneously—called abstract art, himself defined his practice as "Suprematism," meaning an extreme, supreme simplification, in an effort to reach the foundations of an artistic spirituality that flirts with the religious sphere. His extreme approach, exemplified by the black square on a white background, indicates a contamination of the artistic field by the mysteries of the religious sphere, and thus the risk of another sclerosis, an end of art, ultimately an end of abstraction, since the concrete reality from which to take that precious mental distance that produces art is completely lost. We have shifted from one pole to the other, and in the process, we have lost what constitutes the nature of art, that is to say, what unfolds between the two poles. Suprematism had an impact; it influenced other fields—architecture, design, decoration… But this spiritual yearning for a fantasized elsewhere created such a distance from reality that art itself risked being extinguished, precisely as it had previously risked being extinguished by the stifling conventions of academic pomposity. The same danger calls for the same reaction: the need to redefine the proper distance, the proper relationship of thought between reality and the production of art. In other words, the proper form of abstraction.
What emerges is a new context, a new artistic field in which painting finds its place today. And the conviction is that it has no other choice but to anchor itself in its figurative nature, which is in fact abstraction, and to join the other arts that have, fortunately for them, been more spared the literary intoxication and the upheavals required to break free from it. It is about leaving the 20th century laboratory with all its experiments, failures and successes in mind, in order to rediscover that balance which is evidenced by a number of masterpieces found in the long history of 45,000 years.
Now that the path is marked by a few definitions, and some misunderstandings are avoided, we can consider a better approach and try to specify some ingredients or components to balance in order to successfully create an artistic dish. A dish to be served in painting, music, dance, literature, and other performing arts, all of which transmute reality in their own way through the same process of abstraction. This process allows us to represent, to re-serve, this reality as it has been perceived, integrated, experienced, assimilated, digested, and then reproduced, evoked, expressed, translated, and shared. Ultimately, it is the possibility of conviviality, of living together, that is revealed.