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Alexandre Tanham.
Helped by his isolation, when he begins to see lines of force emerge and crystallise — passing from fragile hypotheses and guilty intuitions to heavy, established trends — the true artist finds himself far less helpless before the unprecedented than many of his contemporaries. Served by the economy of means to be put in place, the reactive testing of his senses is easy and can lead to a neuronal short-circuit capable of going beyond (and bypassing) pure reason, in order to grasp as well as possible the movements of the world. He can not only understand them but also be in a position to anticipate some of them. It is within this tendency, spinal as much as cerebral, that I claim my place. And when, in addition, served by a set of pertinent choices, he is able to see what he sees without having to torture reality in order to fall into line with that set. No cognitive dissonance comes to agitate him or revive sad passions. It is in complete serenity that he can face a world, in horror, in love, and thus do so without violence. Simply standing — standing and supple, adapted to the chaos that is dawning.
The a-droit artist is not the one who whines to claim, in an inverted mirror, the place of the mal-a-droit, still less the one who is forever murmuring to the censor, nor even the one who uses the same means as the aforementioned, merely inverting the discourse without changing its form. An actor and contemplator, his path is quite different: more alongside than against, acting over the long term, light because lucid, luminous because dark, and finally profound because gratuitous and disinterested. Essence, more than gold, moves him. No supra-purity for him to seek, and above all to impose on others, and by the same token he is sheltered from the fool's game of the slave market of all against all: he has no need to devour his children, since neither images nor freedom frighten him. He can celebrate life with gusto, for death scarcely scares him. Transmission in place of destruction and submission,