CONCEPTS

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.

“I have always been someone else.”

 That's what Romain Gary said about himself.

This feeling of estrangement from his own life no doubt has is roots in his origins, born Roman Kacew in Vilnius, spending parts of his childhood in Moscow and Warsaw, and only arriving in France at the age of fourteen. (A version of his life can be found in his autobiography, Promise at Dawn).

Can we claim to know exactly who we are? 

Isn't naming things necessarily reducing them?

Roman Kacew was also Fosco Sinibaldi, Shatan Bogat, Émile Ajar, Romain Gary, Lucien Brulard, René Deville...

Amin Maalouf claims a multiple identity, made up of layers of belonging (national, family, religious, linguistic) where nothing is subtracted, where everything adds up.