Dominique de Villepin – The fraternity of sorcerers: Wifredo Lam and the poets

His magic is a magic of being. It’s the place where nature and culture become
inseparable. No tree in his paintings can be compared to a real tree. They
emerge out of the forests of the mind, of the memory of exiles and transshipments,
they are trees as well as boats in which slaves are huddled. It’s
the place where mankind, the animal realm and the sphere of vegetation
get confused in one archaic reality. Are they portraits? Are they landscape
paintings? No one can tell. There are only exchanges of substance and
degrees of existence as in the painting Canaima, named after the islands in
Venezuela, and in which he wishes to capture the “forest spirit.”
In Le Rempart de Brindilles, poems of René Char illustrated with five
etchings of Wifredo Lam, the bird figures, black, white or multicoloured, are
assembled in triangles of golden light and red flames. They don’t merely
illustrate the verses. They are their keepers and guardians, watching us while
we let the text flow out of the pages of the book. The painter found in the
illustration of poems a way to transform his technique, to adapt it to the
formats and necessities of etchings and lithographs, taking pleasure in the
collaboration with gifted printers and publishers like Giorgio Upiglio.
What he shows us is an infinite saraband of masks, of devils and of beasts
that is imprisoned in these canvases, a “danse macabre” in the honour of life
where we see creatures, as René Char described them, “amaigries par lae
nervosisme de l’art” (“thinned by the nervosism of art”). The masks of fear
are held up against the day of truth. They act as intermediaries, as veils, as
window-blinds to make reality acceptable and understandable. His paintings
as Édouard Glissant rightly put it, are “genre paintings of mystery.” Aimé
Césaire wrote that his friend Lam was “the spirit of creation” (“l’esprit de la
creation”).
Few painters have developed such a natural and intense fusion with poets
and their poems. In a way, Lam worked and lived in a time of experiments
and visual discoveries, a time in which poetry had been blown up by the
audacity of visionaries like Arthur Rimbaud, Georg Trakl or T.S. Eliot
and the paintings were radically reinvented through abstraction since the
intuitions of Kandinsky, Braque or Picasso. He arrived in Europe at the
moment of reinvention of the arts when nothing could be said self-evident
anymore. He was to carry further this legacy of Modernity, to open a path
in the inner jungles of consciousness for a reconciled art, without words and
without figures to take form.
In this sense, not only was Lam a poet, not only did he charm poets into
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