When a philosopher paints, he paints painting itself.  His painting turns to reflection on itself and the painting is always self-representational.

Here, reflection acquires a metaphysical vein.  When a painter sees visible things, he does not see them withdrawn, as from a balcony.  He sees them from the inside, because his body is part of them.  He is something visible that sees what is visible.  Within him, it is as if the visible were returned back on itself. A hole is dug, a fold without whose shadow there would be no visual perception.  It is as if the unveiling of things were folding, cloth, … canvas.

When the painter paints, it is the world that folds up and becomes canvas.   Painting is canvas in essence.  A canvas is not the material that the painter covers with paint.  It is the metaphysical substratum of the painter’s gesture.  It emanates visible things when someone visible hollows them and looks at the crust, their skin, on which colours turn up as secretions.  The visible paints itself.  And the painter is nothing but the canvas that clothes him.

Caroline Chariot-Dayez was born in Brussels in 1958.  Painting was part of her life from a very early age, as her staple diet.  When she started her studies, her prime concern was to understand what painting is, and that is why she enrolled in the faculty of philosophy.  She was immediately taken by the works of the French phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty, who would live a deep imprint on her pictorial oeuvre.

Her life has been an ongoing interaction between philosophy, which she teaches, and painting.   They are like two sides of the same approach, the obverse and reverse.  But until the age of forty, she felt reluctant to show her paintings in public (with the exception of an appearance on the RTBF (1) programme “Les arts en liberté” [The Arts at Large]  in March 1995, presented by Christian Bussy

OBVERSE

See page Paintings.

REVERSE

(No need to have a look on the other side:  the observe suffices in and of itself (2))

This self-representation of painting is first the painter’s jacket, like the primitive canvas on which the first paints appear.

The physical painting as the perpetuation of the act of painting itself

Every creative act is an experience of deprivation:  painter forgets himself, fascinated, enthralled by what he sees.  He is but a hand guided by invisible forces, as if they were dictating how to proceed.  There is no confrontation between the painter and the world; rather, the painter is sort of absorbed by the world.  The painter belongs to the things that he paints.  And the world is painted through him;  there is a painting in things.  The colours and light come from themselves onto the painting and the canvas retains, fixes and preserves the projected shadows like an impression on sensitive paper (cf.  the ancient myth on the origin of painting according to which painting was born from the outline a young girl made of the shadow of her friend’s profile  (The first phase, Impression, It paints, The first canvas). You have to wait, be patient, let the impression process run its course, the colours and shapes emerge from the white, as in the myth of Véronique’s clothes (Phainô, Tropism), as in Prévert’s poem “To paint a bird’s portrait.”

The fold as a symbol of painting

The painter paints.  Something  visible is turned back on the visible; as if the visible world were folded on itself (Narcissus as the inventor of painting) (Reflection in a studio, Canvas, Fold(ing), The Fold, The Unfolding):  a hole is dug on the surface of things, a fold without which there would be no visual perception and no painting.  A painting is not called “toile” [canvas] in French by chance:  Painting is canvas in essence.

The fold as a metaphysical key of reality

The fold is the representation of being as manifests itself, the quantification of reality as truth and beauty (Cosmos, The first day, Umbilicus, Phenomena).  Instead of veiling, the canvas unveils – but never totally:  shadow and the latency of the fold are inherent to it.  The world is full of secrets.  The single glimmer lurking deep in the shadow of a fold is like a call from another world (Jacob’s ladder, Blaze, The three messengers, Taking flight, Conception)

Notes :

1. (French-speaking) Belgian Broadcasting Corporation.

2. Painting and philosophy as the obverse and reverse of the same approach.