As a boy, I was fascinated by the paintings that covered walls and ceilings in the church. I looked deep into the landscapes, behind figures who were sometimes dressed to the nines, at others humbly clad, and at others still almost totally naked, in terrifying scenes. I stayed long and faraway in those landscapes. But when "I came round", I invariably felt the same slight discomfort, a kind of spontaneous depression. If my mind had wandered freely, and even travelled unfettered thanks to the act of looking, my body, for its part, had been deprived of any excursion and seemed numbed by having stayed behind the window. I could sense that frustration, without really identifying it.

Later on I discovered abstract painting. Its approach seemed more direct, more immediate, spontaneous and even brutal. It produced the sensation of an almost physical contact with the landscape, a feeling of being one with it, and walking on it.

But after a while, I was breathless. The air became thin. The colours cemented. The horizon hurted.

I don't know who it was who said: "Abstraction makes us blind." It's true in the sense that when you get too close to an object, you lose its outlines, when you absorb the necessary distance for the landscape, like when the cyclist swallows the distance that separates him from the finish, the landscape gulps us.
Some works could still be seen as at times very cumbersome traps or snares, and create the illusion of an immersion.

If I could see the possibility of escaping thanks to the landscape, I had to make a difference between holidays, and drowning.

What's more, despite a large number of window arrangements to try and resolve with hindsight the contradiction between distance and contact, between sport and contemplation, the ways of proceeding remained more or less the same.

We have assimilated the separation between mind and body, and, even more diagrammatically, between the brain and the rest of the body, as if the one could do without the other, or as if fullness could only be conceived as an addition or subtraction.

So it was important to call upon the body, not like an athlete, but rather like a spectator at a football match who identifies with the players running about on the pitch, kicking the ball one after the other.

Looking had to involve the body, and even touch it, while keeping its distance and the necessary hindsight to fully enjoy the beauty of the landscape.

Furthermore, I think that a work can be inhabited, not by the artist's exclusive intention or excessive expressiveness, but by what the work summons. In a way it is the avatar of what it represents. It can happen that you sense a presence through a work. In this respect, I am very fond of the theory of intermediaries developed by Oleg Grabar Furthermore, I think that a work can be inhabited, not by the artist's exclusive intention or excessive expressiveness, but by what the work summons. In a way it is the avatar of what it represents. It can happen that you sense a presence through a work. In this respect, I am very fond of the theory of intermediaries developed by Oleg Grabar, ?Ornament coming from nature is perhaps nothing less than a demon, in the specific sense of an active and essential go-between which Plato gives to the word daimon. Well aware of those demonic qualities, Chinese artists and their imitators in Iran, Turkey and the West lent their plant scrolls twisted forms conjuring up dragons, when they failed to see a dragon directly in each scroll. For natural ornament?no matter how it is perceived and where it may be?always leads to somewhere other than itself; it provides the mediation between the work of art and the spectator, between the object and the person using it.? Oleg Grabar, L?Ornement, formes et fonctions dans l?art islamique/ Ornament, forms and functions in Islamic art (Paris, Flammarion, 2013), p. 303.

A work of art as go-between or vehicle is also something which cannot be described by finite terms. This type of work is not an end in itself, even though its preparation as well as its use require a great deal of attention.

On painting
Vincent Beaurin
2016.