…dozens of pinholes in the canvas / the flat areas of dots / a two-dimensional sculpting medium / a thin wash of white paint / translucency / the related corollaries of depth, texture, and light / luminous planes / sprinkling square-cut confetti onto paper and painting prototypes based on how they landed / optical mixing within three-dimensional space / jubilant and rowdy popular culture [Braque 1914 Bouteille de rhum (Bottle of Rum) / Derrida’s “undecidability”]
“The main thing wrong with painting is that it is a rectangular plane placed flat against the wall.”
– Donald Judd: ‘Specific Objects’, 1965
“The real practice of painting is the production, the bringing forward…of an empty volume, of a surface that has been doubled, prolonged, deferred by the articulation of colours on the plane surface.”
– Marc Devade: ‘Chromatic Painting’ [3.1]
Marc Devade: ‘Chromatic Painting’, pp184-85
3 Pictural production is the doubling of a surface: since the material support is always already a coloured surface (a non-chromatic surface, at the very least), this coloured surface is doubled when at least one of chromatic infinity’s colours is produced on this surface.
3.1 The real practice of painting is the production, the bringing forward, the mise-en- scène of a ‘density’, of an empty volume, of a surface that has been doubled, prolonged, deferred by the articulation of colours on the plane surface.
3.2 Colour (from its white and black limits to infinity) in (alternating) intervals effects a spacing: the spacing of an articulation that produces an empty volume.
3.2.1 The spacing of the surface (from its non-chromatic limits to its chromatic infinity) is the mise-en-scène of that surface: a difference that is the movement of production.
3.2.2 The sustaining of this difference between the production of chromatic colours and their limits is the articulation that produces the surface as surface above the surface, as doubled surface.
3.3 The production of a graphic surface is said to be simple.
3.3.1 The production of this graphic surface depends on formal operations.
3.4 The production of a pictural surface is said to be complex: the production of at least one chromatic colour on a surface of non-chromatic colour.
3.5 The theoretical practice of painting is the articulation of the graphic
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surface and the pictural surface that defers it; this articulation produces not a contradiction but an equivalence or identity of the chromatic and the non-chromatic: the colours black and white being the starting-point and the end of all colours, the site of disjunction/junction and of the absorption/diffusion of their ‘potential infinity’ (Kristeva).
3.5.1 The accumulation of chromatic colours across the graphic surface produces a qualitative leap. It suppresses the linear trace, prolongs or defers the non-chromatic graphic surface; it produces a chromatic surface.
3.5.2 This deferral of the empty volume (irreducible to the following terms: form- content, outside-inside, same-other, since one is the other, one is already the other, one only is through the other) is the material and real production of the surface, of a pictural surface. [Lack’s translation consistently uses the word “pictural” rather than “pictorial” as an equivalent for the French pictural.]
The production of a ‘chromatic surface’: a pleonasm indicating the doubling of production that is at work in the painting effect.
Generalities II
‘Hence the law is not beyond phenomena, but is immediately present in it; the realm of laws is the quiescent (Hegel’s italics) reflection of the existing or phenomenal world.’
This is a remarkably materialistic and remarkably appropriate (with the word ‘quiescent’) determination. Law takes the quiescent and therefore law, every law, is narrow, incomplete, approximate.
(Lenin, Notebooks on Hegel’s Dialectics)
The material formation of the object will replace its aesthetic composition.
(Lef, 1923)
The adventure of the history of forms in reality.
(Pleynet, Art International, Oct. 1968)
The principle of structuration is to be found in the matter itself of that which is structured.
(Kristen, ‘The Engendering of the Formula’, Tel Quel, 37)
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Patrick Ffrench, Roland-François Lack (eds): ‘The Tel Quel Reader‘, Routledge, 1998
David Patten 