Rhuthmos

Hommage à Gustav Klimt

2025-03-28T09:24:34Z

Le rythme qui bat et l'œil qui clignote : renversements temporels dans The Refusal of Time (2012) de William Kentridge

Benjamin Léon — 2025-03-22T06:00:00Z

B. Léon, « Le rythme qui bat et l'œil qui clignote : renversements temporels dans The Refusal of Time (2012) de William Kentridge », V. Deville & L. Le Bihan (éd.), Penser les formes filmiques contemporaines, Grenoble, UGA Éditions, 2023, pp. 233-248.

Le grand rythme de l'art (Élie Faure)

Audrey Rieber — 2025-02-10T10:38:55Z

A. Rieber, « Le grand rythme de l'art (Élie Faure) », Le défi préhistorique, Lyon, ENS Éditions, 2025, pp. 111-150.

Hommage à Park Seo-Bo

2024-05-01T05:00:00Z

Le Rendez-vous

Odilon Cabat — 2024-02-07T10:55:00Z

Le tableau « Le Rendez-vous » (également nommé : « la vieille idée de raccord ») est une recherche sur la poétique des confins. Les confins sont les lieux imaginaires où viennent se rencontrer et se séparer deux mondes, deux types d'espace, deux temps, deux civilisations ou deux périodes de l'activité humaine et qui sont aussi les lieux où ces mondes, espaces et temps se révèlent mutuellement par le contraste de la collision. Le premier des confins, le confins archétype est celui de l'horizon. Repoussé à l'infini, il ne siège nulle part, c'est le lieu où, selon la tradition des anciens mythes le ciel et la terre se réunissent avant que le Démiurge ne sépare les eaux célestes des eaux d'en bas. Et l'infini de cette rencontre est une invitation au voyage, à un voyage sans fin, celui en quête de l'horizon pouvant marcher longtemps.

Il y a donc le thème de la limite, d'abord la limite fondatrice qui sépare le ciel et la terre, séparation sans retour et qui convoque la nostalgie des légendes de jadis. Ensuite celle de la zone indécise où s'arrête et s'effrite le macadam des routes pour faire place à des chemins perdus ; zone indécise, elle-même un confins qui répète le confins archétype de l'horizon. Car on notera que si les chemins retrouvent l'ocre des végétations lointaines sur la terre, le macadam bleu pâle de la chaussée retrouve le bleu du ciel et le gris des nuages. Car ce qui est en bas est comme ce qui est en haut selon la table d'émeraude d'Hermès Trismégiste, dieu des chemins et des voyages.

Dans le même ordre d'idée, les deux routes qui s'achèvent dans la poudre blanche font se confiner deux périodes, deux moments de l'Histoire propres à susciter la mélancolie de l'inachèvement, le temps des chemins rustiques de jadis et celui des machines goudronneuses de l'ère industrielle. A quoi il faut ajouter les indices en sourdine d'une activité plus secrète, qu'évoquent les couvercles de regard, les bouches d'égout, et qui laissent entendre l'existence d'un monde souterrain, mystérieux où jadis des hommes invisibles ont œuvré.

Enfin ces routes qui ne se rencontrent pas, qui se croisent en s'ignorant, illustrent le thème de la faille, de la fêlure : de la divergence inconsolable des destinées sans retour.

Note : La cabane, la cabane aux outils, appartient aux deux mondes, elle est la signature du peintre, par le rébus du nom de Cabat.

Hommage à Jesús-Rafael Soto

2023-02-01T18:00:00Z

Alain Blondel – Disparités IV

2023-01-08T18:57:16Z

Introduction : A Rhythmanalysis of Art

Gregory Minissale — 2022-12-20T20:00:00Z

This text is the introduction to G. Minissale, Rhythm in Art, Psychology and New Materialism, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2021, 300 p. The original Pdf was downloaded from the Academia website where it is freely available. I thank Greg Minissale for the permission to republish it here.

We overlook the hairline fractures in the sheen of an oil painting in order to exchange glances with a long-deceased personage. Inconvenient truths are barely registered : a ridge of impasto collects dust, an uncertain light on the surface moves as we move, briefly exposing the warp and weft of the canvas. To focus on humble materials would only remind us that the silk, hair and flesh, the mind and soul depicted, are bits of stuff slowly decaying. Several centuries of practice have turned this habit of overlooking matter into a fine art : the image prevails over its worthless material substrate.

Why do we overlook matter in this way and what happens when we don't ? This is one of the key questions I pursue in this book. An answer to the first part of this question is that for many centuries it seemed a natural function of art to express eternal ideals – the divine, the soul, the mind, order and harmony, and other immutable truths. Making art has long been an exercise, implicit or explicit, in manipulating inanimate matter and controlling the chaos and contingency that undermine these ideals. Yet artists literally hold matter in their hands, replaying these kinds of conflicts at the back of their minds. In contrast, and to answer the second part of the question, in modern abstract art, wild and rude amounts of matter seem to be all there is to look at. Without order, matter comes forth to produce a direct encounter with its rhythms, textures and viscosities, offering no narrative, meaning or form in which to find comfort.

This book studies the kind of engagement that is involved in sifting through the matter in abstract art, an experience that rhythmically switches from order to disorder and back again. In many of the artworks I examine, matter appears unmodelled and in a raw state. Such work offers the tantalising notion that, however much it presents visions of rhythmic strata, dappled shadows and swarming masses, abstract art is simply pigment, oil, sand and dust – a zone, or more particularly a piece of material, left dangling, free of artistic manipulation. When the artist relaxes control of matter, and the viewer follows this relinquishment of control, there may arise a feeling of passive receptivity to the agitated patterns of matter in the work that seem to gather and disperse of their own accord. How this kind of spontaneous, involuntary and rhythmic connection arises is the stuff of this book.

Involuntary yet structured rhythms in the artist's brain and body arise in the handling of materials in this kind of artistic practice. These internal rhythms are at the same time externalised in abstract art and may be felt as rhythm by the viewer. Rhythm is an essential way in which the brain and body are connected to the world, and this is particularly so in the world of abstract art. The kind of artistic practice that enables these connections resists centuries of philosophical and aesthetic order that has elevated the substance of mind over the substance of matter. But, as I will argue here, such art effectively, and through contact with matter, in fact eliminates this ‘substance dualism'.

To understand how the rhythmic entanglement of brain, body and world emerges we must rely on different levels of description : philosophical, psychological and artistic. For a good example of how artists themselves have intuitively attempted to do this, we can look to the Catalan artist Antoni Tàpies who describes his painting as

organic elements, forms that suggest natural rhythms and the spontaneous movement of matter ; a sense of landscape, the suggestion of the primordial unity of all things ; generalized matter ; affirmation of and esteem for the things of the earth . . . . meditation on a cosmic theme, reflections for contemplation of the earth, of the magma, of lava, of ash . . . . [In] Buddhist meditation, they also seek the support of certain kasinas that sometimes consist of earth placed in a frame, in a hole in a wall, in charred matter (Tàpies in Ishaghpour 2006, 117).

Along with post-war European and American abstract art, I focus on examples of ‘matter painting', which Laurence Alloway describes as ‘a form halfway between painting and sculpture' (Alloway 1960, n.p.). I examine the underlying dynamics of thoughts and feelings involved in viewing this kind of art in the hope of digging deeper into what we mean by ‘abstraction'. Art historian David Sylvester suggests that matter painting symbolises the ‘massive materiality of the physical world, the relationship between man and the raw materials with which he builds, the inchoate matter which is at once responsive and resistant to his will to impose a form upon it' (Sylvester 1997, 171). But rather than being merely a vehicle for the act of painting, ‘the thick opaque matter of these paintings seems not only to have a life but to have lived, to have been weathered and ravaged by time' (171). And for the philosopher Martin Heidegger in The Origin of the Work of Art, art ‘does not cause the material to disappear, but rather causes it to come forth for the very first time' (Heidegger 2002, 46). [...]

Hommage à Betty Acquah

2022-12-01T17:30:00Z

Hommage à Hélène Courset – 2

2022-04-29T17:00:00Z