“We are falling. I am writing to you as we fall. This is how I experience the state of being in the world.”.

René Char

We always catch history in the middle. The world pre-exists your awakening, continues, extends beyond what a lifetime can achieve. We are only passengers. It already surpasses us, extending in all its dimensions, as far as the eye can see, and, one might say, beyond our understanding or comprehension.

If our edges are torn or cut away, space and time, as we intuitively perceive them, are lost in the distance in the form of a gradient: a form of infinity.

Another thing (similar, but perhaps more related to the feeling of an era): the sensation of waking up in the middle of a fall.

Obviously, the biblical narrative plays the role of mythology here, perhaps seizing on the feeling and seeking to explain or tame it. But it is not betrayal, fault, sin, or some form of punishment or penance that I want to talk about. The fall that I feel, in which I feel myself falling, comes rather from an absence of narrative, from the ground slipping away beneath your feet. Like in those cartoons where the character, thrown into the void by some unknown event during a chase, continues to walk as if nothing had happened, over the parapet, in the middle of the sky, and it is the sudden realization that he is in mid-air that causes him to fall. There you have it: the old narratives that provided a foundation, an anchor, a handrail, a place for our consciousness and our actions have fallen apart. The past no longer concerns us, caught up in naive hues. The future struggles to find an intelligible form. The era is subject to an epoché. A form of suspension of judgment in the face of a dilemma, an undecidable outcome. And since then, we have been falling from being without perspective. We fall within our own fall, indefinitely. The reassuring world of our carefree days, the one our parents had created for our childhood, the one of previous generations, has fallen apart with the birth of our consciousness. The scenery has fallen. We have been left with nothing.

However, popular wisdom persists: “The hardest part is not the fall, it's the landing.” And Lacan: “The real is when you bump into something.”

Thus, the stretched-out time of the fall is also a refuge. A kind of parenthesis, a suspension. “So far, so good.” The body's chemistry, like that of alcohol, knows how to create that veil of light euphoria that short-circuits all thought and abolishes time, erasing the very idea of tomorrow in favor of a continuous present.

In Japan, they call hikikomoris this generation of teenagers and young adults who no longer leave their rooms, exiling themselves to the virtual worlds of games and childhood, as far away as possible from reality and the constraints and responsibilities of social life. Individual malaise, on this scale, becomes a symptom. The world that was conceived before us is not ours, and may not even be viable or desirable. It is no longer enough to cling to it as if it were a belief; it is already crumbling and dragging us down with it.

Aquaplaning also produces this kind of sensation: the driving force slips, no longer engages, has lost its grip. Those who have mastered the principle enjoy the sensation of sliding, gliding, and fluidity: in these moments of letting go or temporary detachment, they free themselves from the weight of gravity and roughness, from friction, to experience a form of lightness.

This is because when falling, the body, ceasing to resist gravity, loses the perception of its own weight.

The tragic dimension rubs shoulders with a form of grace.

These thoughts and reflections, which sometimes cross my mind, came to me as I was looking again at Claire Chesnier's work, her atmospheric paintings, and I felt compelled to write them down. This betrays a connection that is forming in my mind and that would benefit from being clarified.

Perhaps the most obvious is that the large colored inks, playing with gradients, shores, and something like halos, place me inside the same fall. I stand facing these large panels, these fields, and my whole body is touched, in the truest sense of the word, moved. I am overwhelmed by the sensation. Perhaps the same sensation that tyrannized and fascinated Cézanne on the paths. The same sensation that Bacon staged in his arenas, his circles. Giacometti in his cages or through his pedestals. Van Gogh in the encounter between copper green and white-hot yellow, in the undulations of a cypress tree. The one that inhabits the interval between the vases and bottles in Morandi's still lifes.

In the breadth of a gesture, once again the minimal evidence of a colored field stripped of those references to visual realities that shape representation, except to project, always somewhat poorly, skies and misty horizons. It is the same vertigo that comes when we stand before an altarpiece, an icon, those vestiges left by the waves of time.

How close could it be to the work of Pierre Soulages, whose outrenoirs are like a welcome to the infinite variations of light, whose patiently nuanced inks seem devoted to its depths and moiré patterns?

I wonder what it is like to live in the presence of such a work. Whether its aura, similar to that of a monk in prayer, a relic, one of those rocks that, coming from far away, carries with it the space and time it has traversed, contaminates our relationship with more trivial objects, with the tumult of the world, with current events.

What do we do with this weightlessness that, it seems to me, each encounter I have had with them has evoked?

And what about the chamber music that I sometimes superimpose on their silence, creating a synesthesia that causes seeing and hearing to merge?

Sometimes I think of the pathos of the group of figures in Laocoon, in the light marble version that has survived the centuries, and thus the redoubled silence in which the cries and suffering, the struggle, are captured. Something is happening, and I cannot say to what extent it is captured in the vibrating or hysterical image before my eyes, and to what extent it emanates from the singular vertigo it evokes in me. In their absolute and seemingly serene presence, something falls within them, like pigments sliding across paper on a micrometric scale. But when I look at them, something also falls within me, a digestible version of the metaphysical vertigo in which I recognize myself as being caught.

But isn't that always the case? Works of art accompany our thoughts and then our lives. They make us want to write, paint, make music, cry, run at full speed, live, love... They scream, they cry, they rush forward, they meditate and they love within us.