Another question, anachronistic this time: What does a painting express? Or better yet, how to tell without explaining? How to narrate without informing? How to interpret the light of a palette, the tone or spectrum of a shade? , What? Constructing a pictorial hermeneutic (and hermetic) where words do not lose their sense of purpose, neither their verve nor their ardor. Let’s read together an artist’s speech when conjecture overwhelms him. In this case, the image attesting to its atavistic imposture: parallels that discover their vanishing point outside the world (out of the frame or out of the frame), organic forms or linear paths basking in pure materiality, the Lacanian lost object: a leap into the void. from space, to the empty space that must be inhabited.

Our famous ancestors proclaimed it: the letter with blood enters.
It will then be necessary to appeal to a scalpel. Each painting will have to be viewed as a wicked surgeon and wander through the gallery like Prussian philologists sunk in a bilingual dictionary: let’s read these words like a painting (these words are a painting and are a pre-text). Letters drawn trying to weave a system of signs doomed to dissolution.

It is like this (I am going to paraphrase, a convenient euphemism for those who dedicate themselves to theft): painting thinks. At a certain point we become unable to distinguish those verbs but only their order. Thinking does not paint. Paint thinks.

Painting finds what the one who painted could not think without painting.

Manuel Quaranta
October 2021