Michael Jarrell

...d'ombres lointaines...

Back to painting, with Leonard de Vinci, in ...d'ombres lointaines.... 'You will portray landscapes beneath wind and water, at down and at dusk. You will portray wind over land and over water, you will portray rain'. Of course, these landscapes are not programmatic (no more than Debussy's La Mer is). The arranging of the painter's texts, their seriation -'mist,reflections and colours,shadow,clouds,snow,emptiness and limits, moonlight and air and rainbow'- does not prescribe objects (to be described) but, as Ponge would say, an objeu. Transforming objects into objeu is what these landscape-pages are doing in his writing process, which he calls his 'petite mécanique', in which he plays a game with himself: 'like a chess game in which one imagines an optimal set of moves which function within a time limit, because exterior events, the partner, will develop a strategy no doubt foreseen but unexpected when it happens'.Peter Szendy, translated by Anne Hanson-de Dadelsen