"That little patch of wall"... white

​

So, that would be it, Painting. The memory of a table.
One might have painted on it. Placed pots, inks, tools.
There would be stains, a shield, an illumination, traces of wax or candles, spectacles, exhaustion, the uncertain color of anonymous, pious burlap—fit to weep, sacred to vomit.

And then the standing wall. The elevation.
The status.
Like that series of apes rising in human imagination. Up to the proud biped, deliberately forming a "Tableau" of evolution.

Or rather, that would be it, the Tableau.
The parietal fall. A bull pierced by the painter’s pride, hung on the wall (see that Ox by Rembrandt, that Ray by Chardin), a pitiful offering to shamanic spirits—an image as much of the Wall as of the subject itself.

One must then dig, smooth, make and unmake the painting, take it up again, expand, scrape this patch of screen down to the frame—the only somewhat certain structure... along with the nail...
Unpaint... Unhang again.

Subtly, I speak of François.
I saw him work. I saw him, with his old walls of canvas and oil, sedimenting Andalusia,
the Valley of Marvels, a vertical slice of sea near L’Estaque, and, if it were still needed,
a portrait of a young girl (schools, of course...), rummaging through memory, burying again,
but on top of it, the hollow shadow of the table, the white of the improbable frontal plane, insolent, attempting to escape the lines that bury it, and that tell us: “I’ve got it.”

“Flee there, flee...” François lifts the ink.

Then there is the table. The heavy felt under the rice paper, the pots, traces of ash, smudges.
A long silhouette stands, bent, nervous, and fluid. A bamboo.
The ink penetrates, imprints the felt.

The felt is what remains of the wall. It will not be retained.
The imprint is no longer a support. The imprint lets go, abandons itself.

And the painter abandons himself to the gesture,
to joy, the rice soaking it up, black light; to space, the paper roll—this painting from left to right, from bottom to top.

This space given outside of itself, that no longer digs, does not take itself back,
makes its own oblivion the forgetting of the gesture that traces it and, with a SIGN, vanishes...

Like that series of signs rising in human imagination... deliberately forming a WALL.

​

Roland Buraud, Paris, March 23, 2004
Published on the People.com website