I do not believe in the prehistory of uneducated and rude savages. I also do not believe in the religion around Picasso, who feels nothing and has nothing to say. Miró still passes, except his name. Dubuffet, yes, I do. This guy has a chest. But tastes and colors are not discussed. In this High Vision=Alta Mira by Alain Aillet, I find myself and enjoy. To read with the heart! (xs)
Cantabria, northern Spain. It is reached after the long silences of the plateaus of Castile, when the sea becomes a promise. It does not impose itself, it reveals itself as a forgotten confidence.
Here, the mountains suddenly tip over to the Atlantic with a wild nobility, draped in musk oaks and secret beech. The valleys are narrow, deep, cut by torrents that sing songs older than Spain. Sometimes the whispers of centuries are heard.
Cantabria has no ambition. It does not aspire to please, let alone seduce. It waits, motionless, for the return of those who still know that certain loyalties are silent, that some countries do not need a flag. It is a refuge for old souls. It is also a sanctuary. Altamira.
Rock art has marked the artists. Picasso, who would have suggested that after Altamira everything was decadence, was influenced to the point of structuring his works -between fragmented forms and multiple perspectives- in an approach that could have been taken by the geniuses of Altamira.
Miró explicitly claimed filiation in some series. Simplified forms with bright colors, the very essence of the artist’s instinctive expression.
Dubuffet and his Art Brut, has never stopped moving away from conventions. Simplified figures there too, rough textures, spontaneity at the tip of the nails.
The meeting took place. These three and many others, walking the timeline as one drifts on the ocean of creation, have drawn from the source — the pure and infinite source of human imagination.
Logic will lead you from a point A to a point B. Imagination will lead you everywhere.
It was not a dream, nor a memory. It was before, during, and after. The cave breathed around them. It was no longer a place, but a being. A matrix of rock, soot, silence. A nave without bow. The walls pulsed with knowledge that no one possessed but all felt.
They were there — the original men, and the men to come. They had never met, yet they worked together.
Their gestures answered through stone and centuries. Their breaths mixed.
Dubuffet, calloused hands, blackened fingers, rubbed the wall with meticulous rage. He sought in the rock the impure form, that which the spirit does not correct.
At his side, a young prehistoric man was drawing a spiral with diluted blood, the girl who accompanied him watched him do, the eyes lost in a primitive trance.
They did not speak, but something was passing between them-a raw thought, direct, without language. Like a vibration, an inner certainty.
“No need for style, thought Dubuffet. Style is a lie. What I want is the bone behind the skin.”
The girl smiled at them. She understood. She had seen similar things in the inner cave, the one you walk through with your eyes closed.
Further on, Picasso wandered between two walls, his hands stretched out like a blind man, feeling the curves of the stone.
He was filled with the evidence of a collective soul present.
Everything was already there, he had only to follow.
A giant bison appeared, born of the relief, underlined by a trail of ochre that he had deposited, not without trembling.
But this tremor, he knew, was the very heart of the miracle.
And then something happened: the ceiling of the cave split, without noise.
A white splendor, a light of old, crossed the space.
Picasso saw Guernica, not as a canvas that he would paint, but as a prophecy that he had already left here, at the bottom of the world.
He took a flint shard, he carved out an open eye, wide, without eyelid. “It will be seen,” he says; but not now. Nor here.” And it faded.
Miró, for his part, did not paint yet. He slept, or meditated, or floated. He did not need forms. He felt the energies pass.
Everything is energy, everything is subtle, the gross is only in the one who looks.
Each rock painting seemed to him a living glyph, a letter from a cosmic alphabet. He touched the wall and heard a primitive rhythmic beat — the pulsation of the world before the Word.
A child of fierce ages approached him and held out the stick he was holding to his chest. “Listen,” he said. So Miró saw signs: constellations, crosses, spirals, clogs.
He saw a red sun in the dark, and a dog trained on the edge of a precipice.
“I have seen you in my dreams, he whispered to the child. You are the first of calligraphers.”
The child did not answer. He moved away, back into the shadow. Everything was confused. The pigments of the Paleolithic became inks from China, aerosol cans, industrial inks. The walls of the cave sometimes crumbled like a sheet of paper, other times they became a digital screen.
But always, the gesture came back. Always, the human hand traced. And in this sanctuary where time was a circle, the lessons passed from hand to hand, from dream to dream.
The fire was flickering. Not a heat fire. A memory fire.
The man of the future will have the longest memory
And they understood all -the old and the modern- that to create is never an invention, but a transmission. A passage. A fulgurance. Something larger that used the bodies to say. Something that neither death, nor silence, nor oblivion could erase.
The twentieth century was roaring. Bombs were falling, ideas were shaking, museums were filled with white walls and silence. But some walls were still whispering.
Paris, 1937. “Guernica” hangs like a shroud stretched over the world. Picasso watches the crowd parade. He sees the frown, hears the explanations, reads the catalogues, listens to the journalists. No one sees the shadow of the bison. No one can smell the burning tallow. He can.
Because he knows: this painting did not come from him. He was born long before. In Altamira. In Lascaux, Cosquer or Chauvet. In a whisper. He has returned by his hand, but it is not his property. He is a voice that has allowed him to incarnate.
And some evenings, alone in his studio, he feels under the canvas the bumpy relief of a cave. He remembers -or anticipates- that he painted an open eye on the wall, thirty thousand years ago, and that same eye looks today at modern crowds.
In Palma de Mallorca, Miró awakens in a sudden burst. He draws signs in the void. They come from themselves, as if dictated from within. He recognizes some of them, they have seen them in the dust of a cave, or in the dream of a child painter.
His brush floats, he does not paint forms, he awakens presences. His paintings are open caves in the vertical. Dubuffet, in his workshop of Vence, macula of the webs of earth, sand, saliva. He scrapes, he scratches, he destroys. He sometimes feels that the walls are watching him. He hears the raucous laughter of a man covered with skins, coming from so far, so close.
Sometimes, in a gesture of rage, he draws a line… and stops. He recognizes this line. He saw it before, in the cave. Or maybe he did it -without realizing it. He doesn’t know anymore. And that’s great. They’re all there, still. Every time an eye opens without a filter. Every time a gesture appears for no reason. Every time we paint as we pray: without waiting, but with fire.
Time is an obstinately persistent illusion.
There is no more of now. No more of then. Only a flickering light and the breath of a suspended world. In a space that only exists when you close your eyes, they are together. Picasso, Miró, Dubuffet. And the anonymous of the human dawn. They don’t greet each other, they don’t need it. They have painted together a thousand times, in a thousand different times.
Around them, the walls are full of old and future footprints. Some have already been erased. Others have not yet been drawn. But they are all there, in the belly of the cave-world. “Everything we have created came from you,” says Dubuffet to an old painter with red ochre eyes. “No, man answers, whatever you have created, you have brought back”.
Picasso rises, front shining. He takes out a graphite pencil from his pocket. He hands it to a child, covered with clay, dressed in a skin of beast. The child takes it, looks at it like a flint from the future. And he traces — one eye again. A too-seeing eye. A wounded eye.
Miró smiles. He contemplates a fresco that no one has painted yet. He recognizes the forms of tomorrow. He reaches out, without touching. He knows that this drawing will appear, somewhere, in an artist’s dream or on the wall of a ship of Hyperborea.
The central fire rises, slowly. It does not burn, it illuminates the inside. It is the fire of the need to create. He who transcends fear, hunger, oblivion. He who makes a man a link between the worlds. The one who says, without words: I am alive, I see, I feel, and I would like it to stay. Then the artists rise.
They are no longer names. They are instruments, relays, clairvoyants. And at the bottom of the cave, something starts to beat again. Not a heart, a rhythm. The one of humanity. The one who draws to survive, created to understand, trace to transmit.
We are all visitors of this time, of this place. We are only crossing them. Our goal here is to observe, to learn, to grow, to love … After which we go home.
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