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

The Detail and the Pan 259no one, of course, will doubt that the mass of vermilion looming overthe young woman’s face is a hat. 52 As such, it might be understood asa detail. But its delineation—since every detail should be separable,‘‘detailable’’ out of the whole*—its delimitation is eminently problematic:within, it tends to merge with the mass of the hair and, aboveall, becomes shadow; toward the exterior, its outline is so tremulous asto produce an effect of materiality partaking at once of fleece, sparks,and liquid projection.† It is singularly modeled and centripetal at left,singularly frontal and centrifugal at right. It is highly modulated, tothe point of including within its radiant mass a few lactescent moments.And its pictorial intensity thus tends to undermine its mimeticcoherence; then it ‘‘resembles’’ not a hat, exactly, but rather somethinglike an immense lip, or perhaps a wing, or more simply a coloredflood covering several square inches of canvas orientedvertically, before us.Shadow, fleece, flame, or milk; lip or liquid projection: in themselves,and taken separately, none of these images amounts to anything;with regard to this ‘‘hat,’’ they have no descriptive pertinence,much less an interpretive one; each of them pertains to what wemight call a ‘‘suspended’’ visibility (as we speak of suspended attentionin the psychoanalytic situation); and in this sense, the choice of oneover another speaks only of the viewer. Nonetheless, the aporia engenderedby their co-presentation tends to problematize the pictorialobject, and thus to create the possibility of grasping something aboutthe picture through the very question, the very antithesis. Whenpainting suggests a comparison (‘‘it is like . . .’’), in short order itgenerally suggests another that contradicts it (‘‘but it is also like . . .’’):so it’s not the system of comparisons or ‘‘resemblances’’ themselves,but rather the system of differences, of clashes and contrasts that willhave some chance of talking about the painting, of getting across howthe detail becomes a pan and imposes itself, in the picture, like anaccident of representation—of representation delivered up to the riskof the material paint. It is in this sense that the ‘‘pan’’ of paint imposes*devrait pouvoir s’isoler, se dé-tailler de l’ensemble.†projection liquide. Cf. G. Didi-Huberman, La Peinture incarnée (1985), 9–13.