MAX BUCAILLE’S ASTERISM
The journey from eye to mind is not as easy as one might think. Even more difficult is to make a gesture turn away from the instinct that formed it, or chance and betray it, to reach the mind and activate it. The painter could be blind; what his hand has traced on the sheet or canvas is not in the power of his own eye, whether or not it passes our gaze, reaches our mind or not. A painting that doesn’t immediately cross the threshold of vision, that doesn’t, as soon as it’s seen, engulf the perceiving subject and imprint itself on all its fibers, is a mere trifle: a carpet, an ornament, rhetoric. And it is through the mind, not the eye, that we return to the painting, that we plunge into it to live a new life, his and in his knowledge. This to-ing and fro-ing, this relay, takes place so quickly that we are hardly aware of what we like or dislike. Our anxiety in the presence of a work of art, the alarm it makes us feel, and then the process of identification, of familiarity with it, we only analyze by negation, when the charm (shock or seduction) doesn’t work, when it doesn’t awaken anything secret in us, nothing we can fear or hope for, nothing that is our deepest vice and will tomorrow, thanks to it, be our “great radiant sin”. Sometimes we feel the same way, striking on the same keyboard of our sensations and intelligence, in front of a black-and-white drawing and in front of a painting with vivid or subtle colors. It seems to me that here we encounter an anomaly that has received little attention in the past, and whose resolution would nevertheless shed some light on the nature of aesthetic activity. The conclusion we would draw from such an examination would no doubt be similar to the one that imposes itself on us without the slightest reasoning, namely that color, or line, or form, or matter – so much stirred up in recent years – while they may be conducive to art, are nothing in themselves, and never dispense with intervention, dream, dance, illumination – all of which are poetry.
We live in the middle of the Cosmos, and however rare hiking may be this season, we feel that the time is drawing near for everyone to find the path to their Sunday stroll. When mankind has traversed its own galaxy and the two or three neighbouring ones, when it has explored Mars and Venus, photographed their landscapes and skies, and built its country houses and casinos there, then tomorrow we’ll be looking for the most “representative” works among the many painters who these days claim to describe interstellar spaces and the faces of the stars, those who will have best foreseen this new reality, as old as the world, whose exact image photography will then deliver to us. We’d bet Peru that this confrontation will be of little benefit, and of little interest. The more scrupulously cosmic the canvases, the closer they will be to the real cosmos, and the more surely they will be filed away in the shelf of old moons, where those ancient engravings are already gathering dust, showing exotic animals drawn by the conscientious, sedentary craftsmen of the 16th century according to the approximate descriptions of travellers. A small historical and scientific curiosity that will have the effect of extracting many contemporary productions from the art department. Of all the so-called cosmic works (as we like to call Max Bucaille‘s paintings) or chaosmic works (if we prefer the word preferred, after James Joyce, by our friend the painter Asger Jorn), only those will remain that prove to be eminently false, as far removed as possible from the banal truth offered by the kodak eye, the works that pursue in the mind the sovereign enterprise of amazement, with its upheavals and flashes of lightning, its panic fears and shadows of serenity, and that continue to beat with a furious wind the banner of aberrance. So it is with the admirable books of Cyrano de Bergerac, which no cosmonaut would take as a guide when visiting the Moon or investing in the Sun. As for those who fear that Max Bucaille ‘s paintings foreshadow the worlds to which we may be forced to go, let them be reassured, or let their fear take a decidedly different turn: it’s not that Moon or that Sun we’re talking about. Neither Cyrano worried about it, nor Max Bucaille today. Men will have long planted their flags and built their barracks where they salute the colors all round, and we’ll still be gliding over the fiery glaciers of the spirit, and we’ll still be hearing the rumblings of the stars within us.
Noël ARNAUD









