georges didi huberman, confronti... - lensbased.net

256 Appendix: Detail and PanIt is, nonetheless, I repeat, a sovereign accident. This should beunderstood in two senses: first, syntagmatically, on the level of thepainting itself, in which this pan of red paint unsettles, even tyrannizes,the representation. For it is imbued, this pan, with a singularcapacity for expansion and diffusion: it infects, we might even sayaffects—fantasmatically, through an effect of the Freudian uncanny inaction—the entire picture. And one by one, the mimetic self-evidencesbegin to crumble: the green carpet, with its scattering of droplets,liquefies; the tassel at left turns diaphanous; the gray ‘‘bouquet’’—theother tassel—resting on the clear small box threatens us with its uncertainty;finally—an extreme hypothesis—it might be said that, hadVermeer wanted to paint some kind of black bird clasping the lacemaker’sneck with its wings, he would not have proceeded otherwisethan he did, with the large, enigmatic blotch of anthracitic gray thatso audaciously invades his ‘‘subject’’ ...The accident is also sovereign because, paradoxically, it flourishesthroughout Vermeer’s oeuvre: an oeuvre that is constantly dealingwith such radiances, with such moments of intrusive color. They arepartial intensities in which the customary relation between the localand the global is upset: the local can no longer ‘‘isolate itself’’ fromthe global, as in the case of the detail; on the contrary, it invests it,infects it. If we take as our sole paradigm the color red in Vermeer’soeuvre, we find a number of examples straightaway.And first of all, minimally, in zones of accentuation, of little flicksand discreet but loose ‘‘threads’’ of paint often noticeable along theedges of his figures: in Young Woman Standing at a Virginal (London,National Gallery), a network of red loops, knots, and reticulationsseems progressively to penetrate the figure, adhering to it, clingingclose to the arm, even merging completely with the mass of the chignon,like some veined material. In Cavalier and Young Woman (NewYork, Frick Collection), the intensity of the red ‘‘supplement’’ to theman’s dark hat captivates and disappoints the eye, because it goes wellbeyond what is ‘‘necessary’’ to depict a ribbon; it is so intense as tobecome something else entirely, a fictional object, an invented material,a pure clearing, insolent and incandescent, of bloody petals. 46Even the famous map in The Art of Painting (Vienna, Kunsthistorisches