Jean-Claude Mougin (pdf) - Picto Benelux

6. The Offshoot
In presence of a devastated world, what is left to us after this progress
through the words, ideas and images, apart from the nostalgia for the origins, the
nostalgia for the aura that knew how to say the nearness of the gods, and finally
this truth, that the work of art is like the living, an object rooted in the darkness
and the withdrawal of the earth?
Can we then hope for a return to the origins? Certainly not, and there will
be no question here to redo images in the old fashion. We know too well the
misguided ways of pictorialism and its impasses.
We should rather be rethinking here the modernity, as a "new twig from
the root", as "rejection" 1 . Rejection of what became worn out, but also offshoot,
in the sense of "regrowth of the being".
The following presentation is not merely technical. Let us remember that
"art is techné but not technique", and that art rests on a knowledge that requires
preliminary looking, like Athena Pallas whose eye shines and glitters.
.
“ And bright-eyed Pallas' self their hands endowed
With more than mortal skill her rarest
works to mould „ 2
1- term borrowed from Hubert Damisch in Art minimal II
(note by translator: in French, "offshoot" and "rejection" translate in one same word "rejet")
2- Pindar: 7th Olympian
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