The Embrace

What if we built an ark through art to preserve ourselves, as if under a tent... A way of

refusing the engulfment inherent to petrification. Nothing less than slipping into the

'Tzimtzum', a space offered to creation. Adding light where the darkness seeks to

extinguish us.

This exhibition on the theme of the embrace is inspired by the radiant, splashing

reunions of the former hostages with their families. What would we be without the

breath of consolation? Leaning against the enigma of desire, we try to hold on. To no

longer sink into the freeze-frame during this feverish period punctuated by incessant

stupors. To resist the numbness born of the shattering events experienced by Israel. Not

to linger on yesterday, but on our tomorrows which open like a luminous window,

beyond the searing.

The artist's calling consists in discerning a space of fulfillment. With their own music,

their subjectivity, they attempt to be a 'Tzohar', a ray of light, a clearing for themselves

and their entourage, frozen by anguish. Like Noah who discovered a new world upon

emerging from the ark.

The hostages of Gaza felt the desert, this emotional void, a shipwreck equivalent to the

unlovingness contiguous to death. A painful chasm they crossed in the cruel absence of

partner and family. Having experienced incompleteness metamorphoses you. To dream

of the embrace, the very one that heralds a romantic prospect of fusion. The question of

the 'two' is vivid, lodged within the structure of the unconscious.

Spinoza, with his central affective concept of 'Laetitia' in the Ethics, designates a joy

understood as a passage to a greater perfection, an increase in the individual's power to

act: love awakens slumbering creatures, he tells us. Hence the truth of the amorous

relationship. To love is to feel oneself being. A psalmic joy, no room for saudade!

The painting reveals, beyond what is visible, the objet petit a, this remainder, Lacan tells

us. For the possessed artist, traversed by turbulence, painting soothes, thwarts their

anxieties, helps reinvent a horizon, an extension arising from these affects. Art makes

us encounter one another by liberating metaphysical questioning. A mental

reconstruction stands to be built. Finding new footholds. To ward off mimetic immobility

with its grueling and bewildering emotional rollercoaster.

Georges Perec used to say that to live is to pass from one space to another, trying as

much as possible not to bump into things. Not to believe in the insoluble, Bergson

warned us; the vital élan (élan vital) is stronger than death, an infinite eschatological

hope. To welcome well-being. It is in the flash of the instant that joy declares itself;

elation is a madness so close to the dilation of the heart; a generous optimism that

aligns with the vital élan, the symptom of a surplus!

To feel, Jankélévitch tells us, resembles love: something new, unheard of,

unprecedented, and vernal. Painting and poetry are the art of seizing or capturing the

opportune fragrance of this present, in the clarity of dawn.