Why, in the history of painting, should the human figure feature much less prominently than the interplay of drapes, as though the figure were merely a pretext? Are we compelled to agree with Hantaï that the fold as an obsessive theme is to be found solely in Western painting? Are painters examining a specific enigma in this case? Everything seems to suggest the frequent appearance of this theme and the excessive attention some painters pay to this phenomenon are indicative of one of the keys to painting, of the representation of the painters' urgent questioning of their gestures. In the same way that the mirror is indicative of the painters' presence within a scene, folds in paintings are the painters' reflection of themselves projected onto the canvas, a kind of "meta painting", or a painting of a painting.

First of all, quite simply because a fold is a flat surface assuming volume, the third dimension emerging from the second one, as on the surface of the painting, when light and darkness create relief and depth.

But more basically, because the fold represents the vision itself and its source of inspiration. When I see, what I am looking at is not only in front of me but it is like an extension of me. The sand on the beach stretching away into the distance is covered with a dark shadow. Mine. The shadow of my feet, my legs, my knees, my body is cast on the sand until the exact moment that it becomes a vision. My body is part and parcel of what I see and the vision I inhabit is a continuation of what I see. The me that sees and what I see are inherently the same. What emerges is a curve, a fold. When painters see, it as if objects withdraw into these artists to create an interior, like a folding on the surface of things where "external features are internalised, there is an invagination of the outside" (Deleuze, p 12). The distance from them is not a break, but nothingness created in the hollow of the same texture.

The common nature that leads to my body forming part of the spectacle it sees also integrates the vision into the heart of things. The painter's body is responsible for investing objects with a vision. The painter sees, but the vision is the vision that things have of themselves. The vision is no longer the work of the painter alone, but represents a certain degree of withdrawal into a space where the painter is the focus, a process in which the painter feels included. This sense of belonging resulting from inclusion is often reflected in the feeling of passivity many painters have during the act of creation. It is experienced as a dispossession, writing while being dictated to. The painter waits, sees the painting as a slow process of printing colours and shapes, whilst the canvas does no more than retain what is produced in the objects, it fixes the shadows that are cast. These are already like graphics or coloured overprints of things on themselves. This invariably conjures up the ancient myth of painting, where it was supposed to have originated with the outline of the shadow that a young girl's friend made on a wall.  It also brings to mind the handkerchief St. Veronica used to wipe the blood and perspiration from Christ's face, whereupon the print of the saviour's face remained on the handkerchief. It was as if all that was needed to place a canvas over objects in order for a painting to appear.  Painters experiment with belonging to a process of revelation that transcends them. Their gestures are an extension of a creative nature.

The fold presumably represents an experience of continuity at the core of creation. Items thought to be separate are revealed to be inherent to each other, having the same texture despite being distant. Difference does not imply separation. There is shadow and there is light, but there is a constant changeover from one to the other. Light grows dark and dark grow light. The darkest areas are never cut off from light: they are gradually illuminated. Darkness is never anything more than dormancy.

The experience of beauty also fits into this category. When artists discern beauty where others see ugliness, they realise the world is more than it appears to be. Or rather its appearance helps it to transcend itself.  Painters discover there is an elsewhere and a time that cannot be grasped, that our world is not cut off from the other one, a channel of communication exits. The shock of beauty is to have a revelation of an escape towards an area beyond matter, within oneself even, a discovery of a passage, like a "Jacob's ladder". Against the background of this meta-physical experience (in the etymological sense of the term) of the availability of another world, everything happens as if our world and the other one were the two edges of the same fold. The invisible extends the visible. There is no interruption, nor any break in continuity between them.

If vision takes form in objects, if the world has a vision in itself, matter is not something compact and solid, but a component that becomes hollow, undulating, to accommodate the differences from which light will emerge. Like an infra-language, vision operates like a diactrical system. Just as the signified is a result of differences between signifiers, it appears like light when the world grows hollow, when visible objects withdraw into themselves through the intermediary of the painter. This is why the shadow at the bottom of the fold is so odd, filled with light, as if from another world.

The fold as the creation of a difference, as a process of "differance", as dehiscence, it is the structure of a reality that is sudden appearance, creation. "This mass worked on at internal level that has no name in philosophy" (M. Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, p.193) but what Merleau-Ponty calls flesh, this "texture" that returns to itself, that is appropriate for itself" (id., 192) is the Component (in the ancient, pre-Socratic sense), carrying the painting. It is the "origin of the world (in Greece, the same word means fold and breast) and the painting by Courbet is no more than a by-product, an incarnation (!).Such "an invariant of transformation" (D, p.29) is the mother of all things, the matrix of that Being "requiring us to create so we can experience it" (id, p.251). To cite G. Deleuze, "the matter-fold is matter time". Compression is the way of being matter constantly in the process of happening, constantly completely indifferent, new and unique every time, as a whole. The fold is the matter of creation, creation that has become matter. It is intractable to any project and any rule, pure chaotic origin. This universal ex-planation is a universal complication but the com-plication also involves cohesion, inherence. The world is neither clear nor straightforward but it has never exploded. The world is a cosmos