English

 

“What characterizes the image, representation as we have conceived it at least since the Paleolithic, is that something preexisting is endlessly replayed in it, in a thousand different ways. It is therefore an eminently active bond maintained with the world. The motifs in the cave of Lascaux, for example, bear witness to a civilization and to ways of being that did not merely see, but made visible their apprehension of the cosmos. A relation not confused but disturbed, unsatisfied with reality, pushes us to recombine certain of its elements, to rearrange it differently, in order to reveal some of its hidden dimensions or to magnify others. This is why the work calls upon the imagination: it always brings into confrontation fragments of reality and the pure freedom of our creative subjectivity.”

Éric Sadin, Le Monde diplomatique, November 2023

– Some words more than others contain a very variable amount of time, independent of their length or of the number of letters that compose them, so that their presence lasts more or less long. It happens that the presence of certain words remains active even after other words have been pronounced. It also happens that the presence of the first casts a shadow over the following ones or mingles with the second, thus forming a kind of chimera from the point of view of meaning.
– I wonder whether one could not say almost the same thing about images…