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

26 Confronting Imagesdelivered. The point of commonality is not (or is only optionally) ashared textual source; it is first of all the general requirement to produceparadoxical, mysterious images, to figure the paradoxes andmysteries that the Incarnation proposed from the outset. The pointof commonality is this general notion of mystery to which a Dominicanbrother decided one day to subject all his savoir-faire as a painter.If this patch of white wall indeed succeeded, as I believe it did, inimposing itself as paradox and mystery for the gaze, then there isevery reason to think that it likewise succeeded in functioning, not asan (isolable) image or symbol, but as a paradigm: a matrix of imagesand symbols. Moreover, only a few more moments in the little cellare needed to experience how the frontal white of the Annunciationmanages to metamorphose into a besieging power. What faces usbecomes all-encompassing, and the white that the Dominican brothercontemplated perhaps also murmured to him: ‘‘I am the place thatyou inhabit—the cell itself—I am the place that contains you. Thusdo you make yourself present at the mystery of the Annunciation,beyond representing it to yourself.’’ And the visual envelope movedso close as to touch the body of the viewer—since the white of thewall and that of the page are simultaneously the white of the Dominicanrobe ...Sothewhite murmured to the person gazing upon it: ‘‘Iam the surface that envelops you and that touches you, night andday, I am the place that clothes you.’’ How could the contemplativeDominican (in the image of the Saint Peter Martyr within the image)disallow such an impression, he to whom it had been explained, onthe day that he took the habit, that his own vestment, a gift of theVirgin, already symbolized in its color the mysterious dialectic of theIncarnation? 12But we must interrupt this material discussion* of the visual paradoxof the Annunciation. 13 Our question here is one of method. Already,these few moments of posing our gaze to the whiteness of an imagehave taken us rather far from the kind of determinism to which thehistory of art has accustomed us. We have moved into the realm of*cette entréé en matière.