In May 2016, a simple chocolate mousse that she could not digest led to Élisa Brune receiving a clear medical diagnosis:

‘You only have thirty days to live, madam’.

Paul Qwest, who witnessed the scene, invited her a few days later to put life back at the heart of this event by suggesting that she and Séroux start writing a book.  The adventure would last more than three years. The book will be published in Paris by Éditions Odile Jacob in 2019.

link to the book

Élisa Brune and Séroux shared the same philosophy of Art and the same desire to expand, interrupted by the unfortunate death of the author in 2018.

Paul Qwest will appear in the writing of the book. Since then, the visual artist and the art historian - the central curator of this work - have joined forces in an endless game of innovative choices, at every stage of the creative process.

The Art of the Curator:

bringing together and orchestrating

Since writing the book, Paul Qwest has been establishing coherence between the paintings, drawings, photographs, questions and various objects that are the raw material for this work. These signifying ensembles ‘make work’, and thus become inseparable.

The idea is to open up a dialogue between the components, in much the same way as the juxtaposition of words in a sentence raises the question of the possible meanings of that sentence.

Élisa Brune & Paul Qwest have brought together in an essay all the spirit of an art of living that implicitly touches on Séroux's work.

Reading the 66 questions (one a day, to be savoured like Belgian pralines) is an invitation to a journey of initiation.

It will take us from the event to the advent.

Making things happen is intrinsic to life as it is, as soon as we see it as a succession of choices, decisions and attempts that are more or less daring or even out of the ordinary.

The art of living is not illusory, according to Paul Qwest's book. There is play between what chance imposes and the space we have to make something else happen. But there is more.

Marking an advent. There are literary, pictorial, cinematographic and architectural works in every field of creation and innovation that mark their era.

With them, there was a before and an after. Perhaps this is the profound interest of what is at stake in Séroux's research. He is considerably broadening the once stereotypical way in which identity was experienced.

PART ONE :

DE-CLUTTERING

CHAPTER ONE :

DEMYSTIFYING THE INDIVIDUAL

1. Character, posture and imposture

2. The person in person

3. The means of narrative

4. Being the product of others

5. The impulses of interaction

CHAPTER 2 :

DUMPING THE SURPLUSES

1. Learning to unlearn

2. Release the bone of meaning

3. Calming reasoning

4. Unclog the tongue

5. To see things more clearly

6. Starting afresh

CHAPTER 3 :

EXPERIENCING WHAT'S ESSENTIAL

1. The singularity of reality

2. The idiot, the one who doesn't make sense

3. The eclipse, a flash of night

4. The night, or the dark side

5. The meaning of tragedy

6. Superimposition as the structure of the world

7. Detachment

8. Openness

9. Delight

PART TWO :

EQUIPPING

CHAPTER 4:

OTHER ATTITUDES

1. Contemplating reality

2. Being in love with details

3. Exploring consciousness

4. Broadening the point of view

5. Experiencing time

6. Getting moving

7. Generating shapes

8. Weaving the true and the false

9. Thinking backwards

10. Choose between two and three

11. Being fragile

CHAPTER 5 :

UNEXPECTED METHODS

1. Giving yourself carte blanche

2. The treasures of waste

3. Rebounding

4. Throwing bridges

5. Dare to collage

6. Composing by superposition

7. Constructing arrangements

8. Enjoying serendipity

PART THREE :

ENTERING THE PRESENT

CHAPTER 6 :

OPENING UP TO OPEN FORMS

1. Hesitation

2. The unpredictable

3. Incompleteness

4. Discontinuity

5. Thought in an archipelago

CHAPTER 7 :

ART BY EXAMPLE

1. The artists :

Robert Filliou and life above all

2. The viewers :

Vermeer rediscovered

3. The work :

The appearance of Vivian Maier

«OUR LIVES", ESSENTIAL HAZARD» 

By Louise Bernard

BETWEEN PERSONAL REFLECTIONS AND QUOTES FROM AUTHORS, ELISA BRUNE AND PAUL QWEST WEAVE A CHORAL BOOK IN WHICH THE ARTS AND SCIENCES REDEFINE OUR IDENTITY.

It could be personal development, but it is based on science and literature. Elisa Brune and Paul Qwest's book, Nos Vies comme événement, claims to be 'choral'. It advocates originality and applies it to its format: after a guiding question that resembles a philosophy essay topic,

- What do we know about our ignorance? 

"Why bring out what is not yet there? 

or "Do we also recognise ourselves elsewhere than in ourselves?" -

the article begins with a fact, an anecdote, or a concrete scientific explanation before gradually sliding into the artistic and concluding with a touch of lyricism.

The two authors then give way and collect quotations from different thinkers, in relation to what they have said before, to build 'bridges' between their personal reflections and fragments of other texts that echo them, in order to set thoughts and languages in motion. The menu includes a wide range of personalities (writers and philosophers), although the names Barrico, Proust, Kafka, Pessoa, Nietzsche, Beckett and Wittgenstein are often mentioned.

The aim is to make use of the different types of knowledge that revolve around us - astronomy, neurology, geometry, linguistics, history - to better envisage what we are, who we are as individuals, what we create, and to reflect on 'events', those that punctuate our lives and shape us, and those of history, on a global scale.

Fissures. Paris : L’Harmattan, 1996 ; 

Petite révision du ciel. Paris : Ramsay, 1999 ; J'ai lu 2000, 

Blanche Cassé. Paris : Ramsay, 2000

La Tournante. Paris : Ramsay 2001 ; J'ai Lu, 2003

Les Jupiter chauds. Paris: Belfond 2002 ; Labor, 2006

La Tentation d'Edouard. Paris : Belfond, 2003

Relations d'incertitude (avec Edgard Gunzig). Paris : Ramsay, 2004 ; Labor 2006

Un homme est une rose. Paris : Ramsay, 2005

Alors heureuse... croient-ils! La vie sexuelle des femmes normales. Paris : Le Rocher, 2008

La Mort dans l'âme - Tango avec Cioran, Paris, Odile Jacob, 2011

Pensées magiques - 50 passages buissonniers vers la liberté, Paris, Odile Jacob, 2013

Le Salon des confidences - Le désir des femmes et le corps de l'homme, Paris, Odile Jacob, 2013

Tant pis, je fonce ! 50 histoires pour saisir la vie, Odile Jacob, 2018

Nos vies comme événement : ce que l'art et la science transforment en nous, avec Paul Qwest, Odile Jacob, 2019

Art is always conceptual when it is anything other than decoration, which is a craft.

Leonardo da Vinci's quote is clear: 

"La pittura è cosa mentale",

painting is a thing of the mind.

"The term "archipelago" can be broken down into the roots "arc" (Greek for "original", "main") and "pelago" (a Latin derivation of an earlier Greek term meaning an open sea, a pool, a gulf, even an abyss, the impression of being on the high seas).

SÉROUX, David REALH, Alex SVI, Zorah SOMEXKI, Paul QWEST & other are like islands

Archipelago is not an ancient Greek word, but a modern Italian word made up of these Greek borrowings.

The elements of the word are Greek, but there is no trace of arkhipelagos in ancient or medieval Greek (the modern Greek word is borrowed from Italian).

Essentialising something or someone consists in reducing (an individual, for example) to just one of its dimensions, which results in a reduction of reality. Essentialising means applying a single, deliberately biased label.

It also consists, most of the time, in REIFYING reality, i.e. transforming and reducing an individual, a work, etc. to the status of an object.

For example: foreigners, women, men, whites, blacks, artists, nobles, commoners, Jews, Van Goghs, abstracts, etc.

The impoverishment is systematic.

It's not the things that matter, it's the relationships between things.

Denis Podalydès quoting Pierre Bourdieu.

Everything is made up of juxtaposed moments, as in a Milonga (tango ball) when each dances with different partners. In so doing, each person eclipses his or her supposed personality to become "other" through contact with others.

Tango dances the tragedy of life, the nostalgia of our past illusions, the pain of break-ups, the absurdity of conflicts, the murder of idealism.

Tango dances the lucidity of the sideways step, the foot born to destruction, love "all the same", and in spite of everything.

I therefore call beautiful everything that contains within itself enough to awaken in my understanding the idea of relationships.

Denis Diderot

This is a dance that does not hide the crazy links between life and violence, between desire and its madness, between attempt and failure. 

A scotoma is an area of partial alteration in the field of vision consisting of a partially diminished or entirely degenerated visual acuity that is surrounded by a field of normal – or relatively well-preserved – vision.

Every normal mammalian eye has a scotoma in its field of vision, usually termed its blind spot. This is a location with no photoreceptor cells, where the retinal ganglion cell axons that compose the optic nerve exit the retina.

Scotomization is a psychological term for the mental blocking of unwanted perceptions, analogous to the visual blindness of an actual scotoma.

This is a process of denial that allows us to "not see" content, images or memories that are too distressing.

A veritable selective psychic scotoma is formed, narrowing the field of consciousness and producing amnesia that is clearly circumscribed in time.