In a world where nothing any longer has a right to a future, neither the forests, nor the dreams, and for how long do the new towns rise, everything is threatened with being scored through with motorways, the built past is crumbling... a man, seated before bare canvases, imagines. What he invents belongs to him alone. Nothing is taken from what was. Nor from what he did. All is new kingdom. There is the first given.
This is a painter, what goes by that name. Of what is he making the portrait? Of that which exists nowhere but in his mirror. There he constructs nameless things, or rather no: falls or balances of nameless things. You ask me if it’s a good likeness? What one invents does not resemble, but seems. That is the second given.
In fact, this has ceased to be the copy and become invention. It is perhaps an accursed path the painter is taking, but it is his path, that is what counts. If I try to compare this way of proceeding with what painting was, I mean the moments of painting, the bison of the caves, the discovery of the human face... and then the apple for Cézanne or the packet of tobacco for Picasso... nothing this time comes down to naming the object of representation. Since the object has no name. It is not abstract. Nor is it the representation of a thing seen. It is an object in itself. And that makes three.
An accursed path... That of the Enchanters. I have always thought, from the very first meeting, that Alain Le Yaouanc belonged to that inhuman species, sprung like him from the Celtic forest. Perhaps he is Merlin. I suspect him of shutting fairies up in trees. Except that his trees are not trees. Nor beings. That what he paints is at once construction and deconstruction. I mean what he paints, of that one ought to say he de-paints it, but you would mistake my meaning, the verb to depaint being forever afflicted with a descriptive sense, and I, I am using it in quite another sense. This calls for explanation.
I have seen a painting by Seurat, a version of the Cirque, now in America, in which the crack of the ringmaster’s whip cuts the canvas in two: above the whip there is colour, but the whip destroys it and the whole lower part of the picture is what is called the non-painted, as though the crack of the whip had blown out, cut off, the view. Matisse, for his part, used the non-painted as a colour in itself. There are Picassos whose charm (in Merlin’s sense) lies precisely in the non-finished, or what is taken for such, the opposition of a worked painting and the non-painted canvas, and I am thinking of that portrait of a woman in an armchair which I saw back in the days of the rue La Boétie, around 1920, which the painter handed over just as it was to the catalogue of his works, with the beauty of the unfinished, its mystery. With Le Yaouanc, “depainture” partakes on the contrary of the finished. The adventure is a different one, and it is what he paints or depaints, what falls or comes undone, in its very imbalance.
Four.
I would go on to a hundred. And still have said nothing. Preface-prospectuses are not my forte. Everything here, in what I am writing, seems to me sleight of hand. Ask the painter what he is making the portrait of. And then watch them come tumbling down, marbles or paving stones, the elements of a vision, as on an evening of earthquake. Or take flight, that which is neither the feather nor the bird.
This painter is the step after. The leapfrog he plays no school playground has ever known. That is what would have to be understood. And observe, if you please, that the peculiar property of his painting is to make real what does not exist. Or not elsewhere than where he paints. Observe that he makes you believe in relief, that is to say in non-painting, and this by dint of knowing how to paint. I always feel the urge to touch the edges of an object that does not exist, to find out whether it is imitated. This is strange, and so, for want of touch, I wonder whether they are the portrait of white, or white itself. Observe. The finger is worth the eye in painting.
Be warned. It takes forty years, fifty, to read a painter as a rule. I have for my part, I have always had a taste for deciphering him in the nascent state (André Masson, Yves Tanguy, Max Ernst, Joan Miró, for example, ah, I was forgetting Paul Klee!). With Le Yaouanc, we have already waited only too long.
Louis Aragon