Le paradoxe Nietzsche – intro

J’ai terminé à lire, il y a quelques jours, “Le Crépuscule des idoles”. C’est la première livre de Nietzsche que j’ai lu depuis la première jusqu’à la dernière page… Évidement, ça ne me fait pas un expert en Nietzsche… Mais il y a dans ce livre (et je crois que ce n’est pas le seul…) un paradoxe qui m’intrigue. Et je travaille à un petit essai sur le sujet… Comme je ne l’ai pas terminé encore je vais vous donner seulement ma première impression (et pour l’illustrer, la dernière variante, finale, de ma peinture “Le cinquième journée de la Création”…)

Quand tu lis un livre de Nietzsche c’est un peu comme si tu regarde certains films de David Lynch; tu te dis: celui-ci c’est soit un génie, soit un lunatique. Ou les deux. Plus probablement, les deux…

“A deadly genius”

I will tell you a story about the quirks of memory…

Years ago I was visiting Tate National Gallery in London( 1993? 1994?). A lot to see, especially if you are an artist and you like impressionists and post-impressionists, for instance. Cézanne, Pissaro, Renoir, Van Gogh…, as I said, A LOT to see…

Years later, I found out my memory wasn’t as good as I thought. I did remember, like in a dream, a turmoil of colors and maybe a landscape or two… Pissaro? Renoir? Van Gogh?… Vaguely, very vaguely…

And yet, a small, very small painting, haunted me. I was dreaming it and the details were quite precise… Bizarre little people, painted with precision but in a marvelous textured way, with saturated colors but not excessively bright… Something like Bosh or Pieter Brueguel the Old... I could NOT remember, even tortured, the name of the painter… I knew just that he wasn’t a very famous one…

A few years ago, I was flipping a pile of junk magazines in a garage sale and BAM! there it was!! my little painting from the Tate National Gallery… it was only a small, bad, reproduction, in B & W, but I could have recognise it in millions! And the story behind that, the story of the mad painter Richard Dadd was even more hauting and interesting… But about his story – connected with the subject of madness and art – next time…(canned laughter)

A taste, although… the portrait of Richard Dadd, painting in a English asylum…