It1 is time to begin. But… when exactly? I find myself perpetually waiting for that elusive "right" moment, which never arrives. My projects pile up and crumble under the weight of my self-doubt. It's time to act, to have the courage to confront this faceless void, to dare to defy the unknown that pins me to the dusty ground of my anxieties. But why is it so difficult to take the first step, to have confidence in myself, to believe in my own abilities? Perhaps it's the lack of interest in adding another stone to this edifice of humanity that seems to be losing its footing. Just another excuse… I have no choice left but to move forward, blindly... but the humiliation of being caught off guard, of being the child who doesn't know how to act, is still unbearable. My only weapon: mastery. So I learn, I accumulate new skills, I study the subject endlessly, I dissect the project to extract its substantial marrow, I analyze the analysis of my analysis... and the idea, born from my gut, quickly becomes this docile child obeying the dictates of my intellect. The pattern is classic: the head takes over the body, which gradually empties of its excitement and always ends up capitulating. My dictatorial brain has won by smoothing out all the rough edges of this project that gave it life, disinterested, I abandon it to my ego.
However, today, the need to express myself is stronger. This vicious circle is pernicious, and I have no choice but to escape it. For the first time, I begin to hear the murmur of my inner self that seems to want to tell something. I just have to write it down on this immaculate sheet. But the form is difficult to envision, the lines and contours cannot find their place on this page that seems to repel my pen that could dirty it, as if it wanted to keep its chaste virginity, as if for me, the act of creating was a rape, a betrayal, a transgression not to be crossed. A submission that I owe to this other... this Self that always imposes on me to be "perfect" even before I have acted, a Self that I must face, I must confront these eyes that have judged my acts since my birth. It's insane to see that the words and encouragements heard remain only on the surface of my body, they graze the epidermis of my consciousness without ever penetrating the abyss of my unconsciousness. It's hard to understand why it's so laborious to listen. What is this very human inhibition? If we are still a society of speech, why is it that these words that come together to make an idea don’t allow my soul to be impressed? These vibrations struggle to resonate with my inner harmony because of this obsessive self-analysis that deafens any possible change. The only solution is to push myself to the limit, like a muscle. I must traumatize myself to the point of tearing to force myself to create new mental connections, and thus perhaps change my paradigm.
If words are not enough, how can we understand ourselves? Isn't that one of the roles of art? For centuries, it was a storyteller that helped humans find meaning; illiterate, we relied on it and listened to these parables that diffused values and our common history. But one day, the written word was struck by the weight of lead and our paths began to diverge. But is it this writing, which has become mechanical, that is at the origin of this split? Or is it the divorce of sound and its meaning that have become foreign to us once petrified on paper? Today's word, however useful it may be for our societal communication, is nothing more than a scalpel that tries to cut the idea into its smallest unit, without really understanding its meaning. "To define is to limit," Oscar Wilde liked to say, who had been able to paint the portrait of a society that was already letting itself be seduced by appearances rather than being. Humans, like our environment, are for me much more than simple separable entities, which I find difficult to apprehend by the simple fact of naming them. We see, we hear, we feel in a global way and all attempts at mimetic representations of our reality, whether with a sequence of graphic characters, billions of pixels, immersive sounds or whatever else, is only an ersatz of our real feeling. Our time is also affected by this surgical approach, our (digital) watches scroll the seconds without transition, without giving value to this in-between that exists between 0 and 1. The rhythm of our lives, in binary language, accelerates and makes us forget that we are (still today) living beings in a continuous whole. It is perhaps for these reasons that the word, like the rest, has a lot of trouble penetrating the soul, we are these inhabitants of Babel who no longer understand each other; a dissonance that seems all the more deafening, as the cacophony of this society amplifies day by day with the vomit of daily information that gobbles us up like geese. Engorged by this incessant flow of "news", we think that "being up to date" will allow us to learn about ourselves. But how could we? So much information cannot be swallowed by the human brain, so we store it without sorting it, and every day, what do I say, every nano-second, the envelope of this emptiness grows and takes more and more space. We gorge ourselves, we gain weight, we are close to the breaking point of the elasticity of our beings, as pollution blackens our cities, the overabundance of information clogs the possibility of any introspection.
Unfortunately, the Art that we produce today dosen’t seem to be able to be much support, because it’s only a reflection of this technocratic society that splits and dissects our world into raw and permutable pieces of nonsense, into random bytes with "high-tech" means that have become the only purpose of the act of creating. Moreover, as spectators of this Modern Art and its conceptual message, I don't know how we could be able to understand anything. We are forced to read lines of explanatory paragraphs, or listen to pompous speeches, to try to appreciate the work that we have under our eyes. Here we are therefore in the obligation to transcribe a message, which was supposed to be sensory, via an intellectual act of disintegration into letters and signs; should not instructions manuals be the only preserve of ready-to-assemble furnitures? Hermetic to our sensations the work finds itself endowed with the basic function of an object with no other purpose than the function of public utility, like a chair, a pipe or a urinal... For me, human beings cannot live without an Art that speaks to their soul, and it is one of the great epidemics that has struck our (Western) society at the time of the Industrial Revolution. Since the end of the 18th century, we seem to have wandered like exiles from ourselves, gradually shedding our grace. Our aimless, unguided ascent exhausts us. Art has accompanied us for millennia by making us raise our heads, and if it no longer speaks to us today, it will leave us alone in the face of this gaping void that has opened up in our "modern" lives. Without landmarks, we don't know where we're going, and we're running headlong without seeing the wall that's approaching at full speed. It is high time to find our bearings again and no longer wander aimlessly according to technological advances that excite us with their novelties, but empty us with their addictions. There is no question of wanting to go back to the cave, of course, and even if I wonder if we have really come out of it, we have always had the will to go towards the light. Our orphaned existence has become increasingly unbearable to live, so we do everything to lock ourselves up in the comfort of our overprotected cocooning interiors, away from this outside world that we neither want nor can look in the eyes anymore. We then hide ourselves behind the hallucinogenic colors of our ultra-high definition masks to try to idealize the image of a society that is gradually taking the path of the best dystopian novels.
And me in all this, what am I waiting for...? I let the incomprehension of this contemporary society of mine scroll by, torturing myself (psychologically) in silence. I find excuses for not giving my voice free rein! I hide behind the difficulty of creating, for fear of falling into this esoteric and hermetic art that would only talk about myself... to myself. Not wanting my works to be qualified as yet another vulgar egotistical protuberances, I refrain from offering my perspective. I am on the edge of this cliff... motionless. Faced with this dark precipice, I often prefer to turn around to peer at the reflection of this narcissism that attracts me with the brilliance of its bewitching song. But, deep down, I know I no longer have a choice, I must chain myself to this vulnerability that makes me ashamed and with which I must become one, even if the fear of realizing the banality of my expression petrifies me. If silencing it protects it from the others, the absence of light wilts it. Its forced isolation is corrupting it into a withdrawal into itself, which will eventually inhibit it from any chance of survival. The only solution: to free it, to let it show itself as it is through the rift that has (finally) opened up. Like a word on the tip of my tongue, I know, I feel that I am close to the act, but the passage is still obstructed by the ganglia of jealousy of this other who has already had the audacity to express themselves. I know very well that it is still an excuse to waste time not showing anything and that my ego manipulates me with its vilest methods to push me back into the entrenchments of a sickly procrastination. It brings out the heavy artillery of criticism of this other who creates, but who should not have done. So I judge it and condemn its work as ugly, useless, senseless, using increasingly disdainful vocabulary. Plunged into the bitterness of "why her and not me", my intellect forces me to denigrate and trample on myself; I curl up and walk hunched over, as imposed on me by the society that I nevertheless reject.
What is the posture that I aspire to? I must open my eyes and realize that I am looking at myself in an untinted mirror that reflects the spectrum of my being, the one that doesn’t dare to come out and that is perhaps ugly, weak, insignificant, what do I know? But no matter, it must choose life, otherwise it is death! It will be who I am and I owe it to be alive.
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