"Life is a harmonic phenomenon, a constant disruption of balance, which generates a constant appetite for balance. It is the means of expression of matter. (...) An infinite number of notes exist on either side of the scale. An infinite number of colors exist on either side of the prism. An infinite amount of matter exists on either side of the classifications of matter. An infinite number of bodies exist on either side of the classification of bodies. An infinite number of variations bring the smallest part of the universe to life in relation to itself. An infinite number of variations bring the parts of the universe to life in relation to each other. Each part of the universe has its prism, its scale, its classification of bodies; each part of the universe has its universe. There are no prisms, there are no ranges, there is no classification of bodies, there are no limits. Nothing in the universe can be anything other than the universe; it is polyphony that will spring from the singing base of the night."

Jean Giono

“When I was between 8 and 12 years old, I was passionate about astronomy.”

Hans Hartung

"Then something else came up

in our faces: this need to say nothing

and song mixed together - it blushed

your eye sockets shifted your colors

in buckets (wolves, otters, and large birds)

Disturbing our frightened palettes—I listened with one ear."

Armand Dupuy

Physically, a disturbance close to vertigo. The eye tries to focus on an object, becomes exasperated, then despairs; it would panic if it weren't a matter of clarity. The surface itself dissolves to open up an elusive abyss within the frame. In ophthalmology, accommodation, while similar to focusing, distributes objects in space, giving them distance, volume, and body. It locates and delimits. It turns us into Gorgons with petrifying gazes, using the paradoxical power of distant capture cultivated by photography, insinuating that the latter fulfills an ancient desire. One could undoubtedly say—the word itself invites us to do so—that it organizes the exchange of subjectivities, that it helps to tame the contours, the sinuosities, the events that, little by little, weave together an environment: There is the near, within reach, that which we lean on, that which, at mid-distance, could be reached quickly, then the far, that which becomes blurred in the distance, veiled by the effect of atmospheric perspective, at the limits of the visible, where doubt and ambiguity reign, and which calls us to go and see in order to define ourselves, to receive a name, to reify ourselves, to fix ourselves. What recedes further, like the horizon, what has no specific, circumscribed location, belongs to the background, the environment, the milieu, the atmosphere, and has only a secondary existence, relative to the objects it houses and distributes. It is of the same nature as the play that, in mechanics, allows movement and articulation. Remove the objects and you are left with this vast, intangible, undefined field, without dimension or thickness, without place. We have a letter from Marie Helen von Kügelgen, wife of the painter Gerhard von Kügelgen, expressing her perplexity at the painting that Caspar David Friedrich unveiled to his friends in June 1809: "A black, infinite sky. Below, the rough sea and, in the foreground, a strip of light sand on which a hermit dressed in dark clothes or covered with a hood wanders. The sky is clear and indifferently calm: no storm, no sun, no moon, no thunderstorm. (...) On the calm surface of the sea, there are no boats, no ships, not even a sea monster. Not a single blade of grass grows in the sand. " Without foundation, without footholds, without landmarks, reliefs, emergences, reference points, it is the whole body that flees and dissolves through sight. And then this natural solidarity is revealed, through which our own grasping grasps us. This reversibility means that the finger that touches an object, being touched by that object, which in a way responds to it, touches itself. And that our reality arises at that point, when the body and the object respond to each other, when “we bump into each other,” as Lacan says, and the pain signals to the body both the reality of the obstacle and the sensible existence that it locates. Perhaps even more unquestionably than through the experience of thought to which Descartes clings in the midst of confusion.

In The Dawn, Nietzsche puts forward some critical elements with regard to Cartesian metaphysics: "Most people, whatever they may think and say about their ‘selfishness,’ nevertheless do nothing for their ego throughout their lives and everything for the phantom ego that has been formed of them in the minds of those around them, who then communicated it to them; – as a result, they all live in a fog of impersonal or semi-personal opinions and arbitrary and, so to speak, poetic value judgments, always in each other's minds, which in turn live in other minds – a strange world of fantasies that nevertheless knows how to give itself such an objective appearance! This fog of opinions and habits grows and lives almost independently of the people it covers; it is responsible for the prodigious influence of general judgments on “man” – all these people who do not know themselves believe in this bloodless abstraction, “man,” that is, in a fiction.

Anticipating psychoanalysis, he continues in Beyond Good and Evil and in The Will to Power: "If I analyze the process expressed in this sentence: ‘I think,’ I obtain a series of rash assertions that are difficult and perhaps impossible to justify. For example, that it is I who think, that something must think, that thought is the result of the activity of a being known as the cause, that there is an ‘I’, and finally that we have established in advance what is meant by thinking, and that I know what thinking is. For if I had not decided the question in advance, and on my own behalf, how could I swear that it is not rather a matter of “wanting” or ‘feeling’? In short, this “I think” presupposes that I compare, in order to establish what it is, my present state with other states that I have observed in myself; since I have to resort to “knowledge” that comes from elsewhere, this “I think” certainly has no value of immediate certainty for me.“ And for him, ”Everything that enters consciousness in the form of unity is already extremely complex; we never grasp more than an appearance of unity."

This appearance of unity, this form of authority, like that of independence, is one of the most powerful narratives we forge. "Through the Cartesian path, we do not arrive at absolute certainty, but only at a very strong belief. "

And this belief is precisely what causes us to worry and become troubled in the absence of pre-established, tangible certainties to which our sensitive being could cling and hold on to.

Any refusal, justified by “we can't see anything,” would reveal our fear, our anxiety of losing ourselves and seeing our world, our certainties, our reference points, our evaluation criteria, and our judgment collapse. Nothing less.

“Painting often baffles us. It presents the eye with colors and shapes that are obvious or very simple—but often colors and shapes that we did not expect. Unfortunately, the eye often knows how to close itself to the obvious, when the obvious is there to baffle it,” writes Georges Didi-Huerman, introducing the work of Fra Angelico.

Conversely, allowing oneself to be caught up and carried away by this indeterminacy, insofar as it disconcerts, disorientates, and displaces, dissolving into it, engages in an experience of vertigo, of letting go. It means engaging in an experience of oneself that is different from the one that has prevailed in our culture for centuries, which narrates the fortification of being through separation and the definition of ontologies. It means welcoming that oceanic feeling that haunts poetry and love and which Romain Rolland analyzes. A religious feeling, he writes to Freud, skeptical, or more precisely a sensation of a form of eternity or expanse “without perceptible boundaries.” It is also a feeling of participating in a greater whole, of being engaged, embraced, and connected to it. Romain Rolland thus bears witness, notes Camille de Toledo, to the intuition of a connection “vaster than that which human theater tends to trample on”; that life depends on its entanglements, its attachments to the whole. He thinks "of the states of ecstasy we experience when we are faced with and immersed in a landscape that surpasses us, or when our eyes are lost in immensity; when, in the effort of walking, in love or in intoxication, we feel our bodies dissolving into a fuller and more expansive envelope. "

Then the image of Caspar David Friedrich's Wanderer comes to mind, hoisted onto a rocky outcrop at the end of a long walk, catching his breath as he embraces the expanse, contemplating the intangible, vaporous, and mobile sea of clouds. The body reassured by the effort, the line we draw in our minds to add one step after another until we reach the summit, drawn by this call of space, of beauty and terror, which forges the sublime.

We are also reminded of Baudelaire's mystical impulses in his poem Elevation, which stands tall, like this figure seen from behind, standing facing the Open, as Rilke would call it, close to launching himself into it:

"Above the ponds, above the valleys,

The mountains, the woods, the clouds, the seas,

Beyond the sun, beyond the ethers,

Beyond the confines of the starry spheres,

My spirit, you move with agility,

And, like a good swimmer swooning in the waves,

You cheerfully crisscross the deep immensity

With an indescribable and masculine voluptuousness.

Fly far away from these morbid miasmas;

Go purify yourself in the higher air,

And drink, like a pure and divine liquor,

The clear fire that fills the limpid spaces.

Behind the troubles and vast sorrows

That weigh down the misty existence,

Happy is he who can, with a vigorous wing,

Soar toward the luminous and serene fields;

He whose thoughts, like larks,

Take flight freely toward the heavens in the morning,

Who hovers over life and effortlessly understands

The language of flowers and silent things!"

A call to “plunge into the unknown to find something new.” A call to an indescribable serenity, to a form of inclusion and natural complicity, far removed from urban commerce, petty intrigues, power struggles, competition, and ambition.

A call to this Openness, which Rilke despairs of in his Elegies:

"We have never, not a single day,

The pure space before us on which flowers

Open infinitely."

The oceanic, continues Camille de Toledo, is the name given by Romain Rolland to "that which responds to modern fictions, to the madness they have engendered. It is the name he finds for this ascending vertigo of the most vast connections."

Pessoa, in the troubled identity of his heteronyms, gives it substance, preferring to the Cartesian cogito its sensitive alternative, a way of extending rather than locating, of disturbing rather than reassuring, of meandering rather than cutting: I feel, therefore I am.

And a jubilation comes, carrying the whole body away in its wave, making it liquid, as Bram van Velde said he was. Space itself wavers when you move from one painting to another, your vision blurred, with the sensation of being enveloped, wrapped in something intangible that passes through you, winds around you, carries you like music. Color becomes melodic. You recognize tonal vibrations in the variations and modulations of hues. There is no need to seek a theory of correspondences or equivalences when everything is so intertwined in a form of kinesthesia: space, colors, light, sensations, acoustics. Plato called this mathematical order “music of the spheres.”

“Like long echoes that merge from afar

In a dark and deep unity,

Vast as the night and as the light,

Perfumes, colors, and sounds respond to each other.”

And Rimbaud, of course:

A black, E white, I red, U green, O blue: vowels,

One day I will tell of your latent births:

A, black hairy corset of dazzling flies

That buzz around cruel stench,

Gulfs of shadow; E, candor of vapors and tents,

Lances of proud glaciers, white kings, shivers of umbels;

I, purple, spattered blood, laughter of beautiful lips

In anger or penitent intoxication;

U, cycles, divine vibrations of viridian seas,

Peace of pastures strewn with animals, peace of wrinkles

That alchemy imprints on great studious foreheads;

O, supreme Bugle full of strange stridulations,

Silences traversed by Worlds and Angels:

— O Omega, violet ray of His Eyes! "

Because they are appeased, all passions seem to blend together in the transition from one hue to another, from gravity to a form of mischievous freshness, from tenderness to grace.

And then, yes, unfolding before us, but also within us, in infinite modulations, like a sea, a movement of swells, “that pure space on which flowers open infinitely.”