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

24 Confronting Imagester, which postulated simultaneously the immediate humanity of theflesh and the virtual, powerful divinity of the Word in Jesus Christ. Ido not say that the bianco di San Giovanni, the pigment used in thelittle cell of the monastery, represented the Incarnation, or that itserved as an iconographic attribute of the central mystery of Christianity.I say only that it was one of the means of figurability used byFra Angelico—labile means, always mutable, movable; means in somesense over-determined and ‘‘suspended’’—and that, there, it presenteditself to envelop the mystery of the Incarnation in an affecting visualnetwork. Much of the intensity of such an art derives from this reckoning,always ultimate—because aiming at its beyond—with the simplestand most occasional material means of the painter’s craft. ForAngelico, white was neither a ‘‘coloring’’ to be chosen arbitrarily toemphasize or, conversely, to neutralize the objects represented in hisworks; nor was it a fixed symbol within an iconography, howeverabstract. Fra Angelico simply used the presentation of the white—thepictorial modality of its presence here, in the fresco—to ‘‘incarnate’’on his level something of the unrepresentable mystery onto which hiswhole faith was projected. White, in Fra Angelico, does not pertainto a representational code: on the contrary, it opens representation inview of an image that would be absolutely purified—a white vestige,a symptom of the mystery. Although it offers itself straightforwardlyand almost like a blow, it has nothing to do with the idea of a ‘‘naturalstate’’ of the image, or with that of a ‘‘primitive state’’ of the eye. Itis simple and terribly complex. It delivers the blow—the whack*—ofan extraordinary capacity to figure: it condenses, it displaces, it transformsan infinite and inappropriable given of Holy Scripture. It offersthe visual event of an exegesis in action.It is, then, a surface of exegesis, in the sense that we would speakof a surface of divination. It captures the gaze only to provoke anuncontrollable chain of images capable of weaving a virtual netaround the mystery that links the angel and the Virgin in this fresco.This frontal white is nothing but a surface of contemplation, a dreamscreen—but one on which all dreams will be possible. It almost asks*pan.