Letters

21/2/92

I have heard AlbertJacquart who just published La Legende de la Vie. He was very moving - full of admiration for the miracle that life is and this unbelievable thing called "Man".

He was recommending that we preserve both on earth. Not far from my iconography's goal - my admiration resembles his, resembles the one of ail these men who can still burst from admiration and still keep on admiring against ail odds...

I keep on leaving the background as 1 paint - just the bare, white canvas.

I cannot understand why, but I am unable to dirty it up, that perfect white, with any color. If 1 try, my hand stops ten centimeters from the canvas and 1 cannot achieve the motion that would touch it. It is very curious how one is led.

24/1/93

It is now ten years since the Antwerp retrospective. The road traveled shows a total liberation, great discoveries, and finally this "fusion"; short of a better term, so difficult- this fusion between the three major expressions in this century's view: Abstraction, Realism, and Expressionism.

Anyway, when one makes this century's assessment then ail this prolifération quickly dies, thins out, and becomes vain. Facing the world's true problems, everything is put in perspective. One must now fight against the "inhuman" and one of the means, short of physical strength, is to use other faculties - painting may appear today to be a wretchedly poor force, but it may be one nevertheless. Not a political force, buta force of communication.

13/3/93

The problem lies in the "esprit" or rather, as Finkelkraut put it, in the "Defaite de l'Esprit" (Defeat of the Spirit) which bas upheld or rather held down this century, and which we must eliminate. It is a work of patience, and for a humanist, on/ y possible with the love of one's fellow humans. (This reminds me of my eldest sons letter about me to one of my friends ten years ago. He wrote: "My mother bas a love of ber precious species, man, that is baser/ on an unfailing belief in its basic goodness, and as such she breathes hope for it with every brush stroke. ")

16/4/93

In Philadelphia, 1 said to myself looking at the canvasses on the wall (that wall of stones so different and so strong, which remind you of the mountain, the earth, and finally, the whole universe (like the iris of the eye)) that the wall was the strongest. So ... I have to work even stronger. One is never strong enough, side by side with nature, which we must not reproduce, but being

inspired by it, measure ourselves against.

21/4/93

...the arts escape everything tangible, and to survive they must have total freedom In the meantime, we are just floating above the ocean line - and the world tries to find a new direction.

In ail this, the search for an inner peace, which is at the heart of what art is about, bas disappeared as well, because art bas become a mere decoration to man's life, rather than the search for an invisible lacet, hidden in ail of us, to which we must devote our hie. It is therefore a "feat" to be

A piece of writing from Paris, when I was 22 years old:

When there is no human life, I am not "with ét"; therefore weakrness. . . To what purpose is it to feel these emotions if one cannot share them with someone. Seen tlhis morning, the Spanish and Italian galleries at the Louvre, relationship Greco - Rembrandt, the same sense of unity, the on~e in grays and the other in "warm earth" colors.

11/7/93

For me, painting is the act of uniting thinking and emotions regarding ail that is happening in human evolution, by utilizing the means of ail times, and even fr-om more than one civilization. All this is terribly enormous, and 1 am not su amazed any more to have spent so much time doing it.

I think ... that Man and the Earth remain at the core of my research.

19/7/93

I begin to dream about the reasons, for which and through which, 1 realized - even as a little girl - that this curse, "mone,y as a purpose" was ail wrongand how it inevitabl y lead me to draw "Man' rather than "objects" or anything else. Mis hands, bis feet, his face, and the folrls were the first °steps" of my childhbod research. The folds of the earth, so, the Earth and Man. The feeling that man had to be rooted out of an oblivion was haunting me, without knowimg the causes. It was a constant challenge to me, so much so because I had to find the means and at that time alread,y, it was without any answer in my contemporaries.

Not withstanding the terrible doubting crises that ail beings invested with faith suffer, I was always reinvested with an inner force to start again this struggle, against the spirit of the times.

Today, as the whole occidental civilization crumbles down and brings the whole globe to pieces with it, the certainty about the last century's humanism having been "derailed," that is to say, that the traces have been erased is a "fait accompli." My image of the "actual Man" is but a “project of Man" - his lines are very feverish, he is as if trying to get over a "Steinian" splitting - Gertrude Stein understood the Twentieth Century so well.

So, all my titles, now that I see better how man, humanity will rise from this cataclysm, will have a common denominator.. . I conceive it, not as a very sharp image, like the Greeks,

or the Egyptians, or that of the Renaissance, but rather, in a state of transition, as if between

"an embryonic state" and "homo - Sapiens" in becoming "Sapiens-Sapiens" Erectus!

I would love to set him completely standing up, before the end of my life. Then, 1 would not have lived in vain, if I could get there ... Who knows? I want to re-center Man in Man.