And now Alain Le Yaouanc has taken to writing on stone the sequel to that strange, disquieting thought which he had hitherto translated as readily by the traditional means of painting as by collages, attaining the extreme, it would seem, of that reverie of our century, where he stands beyond Braque and Picasso, beyond Max Ernst and Jiri Kolar, he who has even given that modern magic the till then inviolate field of sculpture... And now Alain Le Yaouanc offers through lithography passport to the spirit of a time he has thought to call the time of the beams, and I steal the words from his lips, in this Paris that has become one entire building site, a Pompeii where everything seems renunciation of architects’ plans each day superseded, towers rise, secret hells are hollowed out, the materials of reconstruction lie strewn about, the dustbins of a whole people reduced to pygmies’ lodges under the crushing load of papers, of cardboard, of useless toys, of imperishable nylon...
How do you expect me to tell, in this small space, the wonderment and the surprise? I would need, I always need a hundred pages to say that I love. To say what I love in this universe where man’s steps are already making their way, his fingers of fire at least onto other planets, and into the indecipherable field of the stars. One must write minuscule here to give the feeling of the without-limits, write so small that the dwarf words I use give the scale of what I think, and no more manage to say it than the bull fixing his eyes of terror on the child toreador before him so big that he loses his head.
Louis Aragon Paris, November 1973