The façade and the picture plane

Abstract

Abstract If, following Bois, the task of the painter is the development of a thought that is properly pictorial, then this article will explore the idea of commitment as a problem for discourse: any claim about a painting’s relation to its outsides being a function of what writing is capable of saying in the face of such a thought. Appropriating the biological model of autopoiesis (which sets out to analyse the genesis of a living form from its point of view rather than from the observer’s), the article analyses Uslé’s painting, La Garganta de Albers, Las Muelas de Gaudí, in order to demonstrate that its outsides are a production of its internal ‘organization’. This internal organization cannot be described (from the outside), and so the article suggests the idea that the painting functions through the metaphor of the façade. Ultimately, there is no real evidence for this because the relation between writing and painting is marked by discontinuity. However, although this is a problem for the writer (who might want to control what the painting means), this methodological problem is a sign of commitment insofar as the incomprehensibility encountered in front of the painting elicits a new kind of thinking inaugurated by the work’s specificity.