With a selection of artworks from:
CORNEILLE / Jean DUBUFFET / Mounir FATMI / Auguste HERBIN / Sadaharu HORIO / Rebecca HORN / Wassily KANDINSKY / KUPKA / Yayoi KUSAMA / Wifredo LAM / Gérard SCHNEIDER / Jacques VILLEGLÉ / Pae WHITE / Tatiana WOLSKA
If I take a sudden look at my thought as it is, I can feel no comfort in having to endure that interior speech, impersonal and without source; those transitory shapes; and that endless series of speculations broken off by their own facility, transforming one into the next, without changing anything in their course. 'Incoherent without seeming to be so, instantly nullified in proportion to its own spontaneity, thought, by its very nature, is lacking in style.
But Ι do not possess every day the ability to fix my concentration on certain needful entities, nor to simulate those mental limits that would create an impression of beginning, fullness and ending, in place of my intolerable flux.
A poem is a continuity during which, reader, I breathe in accordance with a pre-established law; what I contribute is my breathing and the mechanics of my voice; or simply their potential, which can be reconciled with silence.
I surrender t o the divine rhythm: reading, living where the words may lead. As they appear, they are written down. Their sonorities are harmonized. Their disturbance re-forms itself, along premeditated lines, until they spring, splendidly and chastely grouped, into resonance. Evenwhat surprises me is guaranteed; it is concealed in advance, and is a constituent part of Number.
Stirred to the fatal act of writing―and provided the ever-to-be measure irretrievably fixes my memory―I feel the whole force of each single word, thanks to my prolonged waiting upon it. This uplifting rhythm, which I fill with color, keeps me free of false and true. I am divided by no doubt, tormented by no reasoning. Nothing random, but an extraordinary stroke of luck asserts and confirms itself. Without struggle, I can find the language for this felicity; and by way of artifice I can think a thought that is all certainty, miraculously provident―whose leaps are calculated, with no unwilled obscurities, and whose movement controls, whose wholeness fullfils me: a singularly perfected thought.
Paul Valery, The Lover of Poems
