When offered to choose one from among those paintings, Fuentes selected Barbarica, for — as he explained in his letter — in this he found "la tradición Velasquiana con la del esperpento (Ghelderode) y Ensor". "Esperpento" was illuminating, for a scarecrow alone was truly apt to gather and compress contradictions. Flaubert used to ritualistically take his visitors at Croisset to a neighboring puppet show. Micheline Lo had retained a memory from her adolescence, almost traumatic, of the Greek actors perched on their cothurni, ancient esperpentos, in Cohen's production of Aeschylus' Agamemnon, played by students of the Sorbonne

1989: La Vache bleue

Was there anywhere a figure that would sum up, almost all at once, the cerebral landscapes which the human neurons project onto the real landscapes? One more portrait, but of the entire Planet?

There was at the time a camembert cheese on the market sold under the brand name of "La Vache Bleue", and its label indeed depicted a cow, colored in blue. As she saw it lying on her breakfast table, the painter who maintained she imagined nothing, but only read the indices present on the canvas texture, began to recognize there universal maternities, maps of countries and continents, an atlas of the starry sky, the Dream of the fatfleshed and of the leanfleshed kine.

About sixty drawings and paintings, of all sizes, were made with such names as the Vache espace, the Vache grande île, the Vache ciel, the Vache Méditerranée, the Vache nuit, the Vache arc-en-ciel, the Vache Alpes, the Vache Terre, the Vache truie, the Vache bois brûlé, even the Vache Galla Placidia, from that tomb near Ravenna, which is the most celestial tomb in the world with its lapis lazuli mosaic. All visitors, from the committed politician to the botany teacher, were surprised to be able to fully breathe again in the apnea of the art of the time, which had been through the "Support-Surface" current. Not only in India is the Cow the deity of a religion which does not have any unbelievers.

At the time of the exhibition, a text by Luc Delisse commented on the virtues of the canvas as weaving, and accidents of weaving. "The canvas is waiting, becoming tense, in a silence fit to cry. Then, slowly, some life ebbs in. Mountains change colors, become bluish. Crystal after crystal, they come off the surface. A frosty sky, all mist and transparent pleasure, occupies its arbitrary place. Nowhere, where the wheel turns, do stains, powder, and mites reappear. Transcendence, eh? Is that the word? Transhumance! Say no more!"

1990: Two more suites of Dante's "Paradise": Astrology of the ten skies

Homo is a born astrologer. Even more: physics began with astrology. At the conclusion of Antiquity, Plotinus conceived the cosmos as a Procession of the luminous One to the shady Multiple, at the same time as a Recession from the Multiple to the One, based on Ten Skies. This is what Dante again saw, a thousand years later, through Dionysius the Aeropagite. Micheline Lo had failed to underscore this aspect in her three suites of the thirty-three Canti of Il Paradiso, and she had to revert to this. Following the narrative order of his Commedia, Dante had been an astrologer, from the bottom to the top, from the Moon to the Empyrean. As both Plotinus and Dionysus had it, Lo's painting could be read both ways. Let us decide that, for the sake of instruction, we shall read them from top to bottom.

(10) L'Empyrée, that is the-fire-inside, strictly transcendent, can be glimpsed only as set back behind the ellipse of an outsize eye. (9) Le premier mobile is the principle of native geometries. (8) Les étoiles fixes inaugurates initial physical functions, but only preformed, preforming. (7) Saturne inaugurates colored formations, under primitive preformations recalled over a demarcation line.

(6) With a black-feathered wing, Jupiter opens the social field. (5) Mars shows that this Order must needs be accompanied by Conflict, Heraclitus' "polemos patèr pantôn", a clash of horizontal and vertical bars against a red background. (4) And now, in splendor, comes the Justicier, "Noon the Righteous", the King, the Sun, blue and gold. (3) Vénus, the morning star, gathers all that coolness which, according to Ungaretti, is the unique privilege of the Mediterranean ontology, that of Homer, Virgil, and the auroral Dante of the Purgatorio. (2) Mercure is witness to the trouble of our minds and senses. (1) La Lune, misty, earthy, with its pale lights, finally places us there, where we live.

After this, the artist had only to resume those ten skies, in very large and very concrete form (7 x 7.4 feet), as ten skies, this time rather small and very abstract (3.3 feet square). The final square of the Empyrean was the painter's farewell to Dante's Paradise.

1992: L'Enfer de Jean Genet

In the pilgrimage of cerebral landscapes, an Enfer was bound to follow a Paradis. Not the Inferno of Dante, too anecdotal and moralizing, too political, but the real Enfer — that of Jean Genet. The one of Crime and of Glory, of crime's glory. Micheline Lo fondly recalled how, still in her teens, after she had read Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment, she had become Raskolnikov. As a painter, after she had been Dante and Beatrice, she became Genet's bandits, the more so as Genet did not describe his criminals from the outside, but precisely from the proliferation of their strange neuron colonies. Had he not shared their destiny as a thief, and as a prisoner? A painter, wrote Luc Delisse, is a thief and a murderer.

Pictorially, each "hero" needed to be there, and so obviously in his individual capacity of heroism that he would be recognizable at first sight. A friend who had dropped by one day was able to name each one without any hesitation. But this remained trivial, Freudian, psychological. It was important to attain the Tenebra that made those nights incandescent. The first to attain its glory was Harcamone, with his nose-sex erect as a central Roman pillar, with his aura of miracles, as on that day when his chains were transubstantiated into garlands of roses before Genet's enamored eyes. Then the others, beatified one after the other, made the contemporary system of criminal glory.

Luc Delisse, in front of the portrait of Weidman, the bandit who opened Notre-Dame-des-Fleurs, wrote: "pinched lips, low forehead, frightened look, hollow cheeks, an aura of gauze around his head, and a pervert twitch of the nose", "that ash, that misfortune, those eyes of a happy torture victim", "comedy stretching to crime, initiation changed into a Way of the Cross", "everything that could be game and pleasure turned into tragedy, in a universal fire of funeral pump." And again: "Behold this art of dangerous, dirtying, and incompatible colors". "The blue air that evaporates (...) the green and the brown in slices, slow satellites, droplets of blood, delicately greenish festering. And the Red Sea, quite black underneath." "A clotted red, extremely violent, very close to the lumpy garnet of certain velvets, those of the shabby lounge chairs that can be found all over the provincial towns."

Micheline Lo was particularly fond of Bach's Saint Matthew Passion. La Mort d'Harcamone became her passion according to Saint Genet, Actor and Martyr, to quote the bold title which Sartre gave to his lengthy essay on the novelist bandit and playwright. The writer of Flexte copied the meanders of the text, both as a sequence of words and as a sequence of phantasms. Valéry's La Jeune Parque had not stepped down so hollow-sounding a stairwell, for she finally uttered: "Come lower. Speak lower (...) Black is not so black."

1994: Salammbô

The reader will recall that, when she chanced upon La Tentation de saint Antoine, it was in fact Salammbô that she had been looking for. Her Salammbô had been latent. This was the only time that she went on an initiation journey.

She was staying at La Marsa, and on her way to Tunis she would daily go through Carthage, or rather through its remaining shadows. Naturally, she spent some time in the Taphet, known for its child sacrifices. She was able to read, on columns, accounts of those sacrifices, kept in Phoenician writing, a system that shared the purely accounting cursiveness of Aramean and ancient Hebraic writings. She saw the Cap Bon, from the vantage point of what is supposed to have been the port used by Hamilcar and the young Hannibal. One night, she had tea, seated perhaps on the very same chair where Flaubert had been sipping his.

The cerebral landscapes of Flaubert's Salammbô have a special quality: they are absolutely frontal and compact. Only the Etruscan sculptors of that same epoch appear to have viewed certain faces in this manner. Let us recall the phonosemics of the text, which opens on the most compact phonetic pair of the French language: "K-A" and A-R", "KAR" (C'était à MéGAra, faubourg de CARthAge dans les jARdins d'HAmilKAR), and closes on four enclosing"T"s (Ainsi mOURut / la fille d'HAmilKAR / pour avoir Touché / au manTeau / de TaniT). With the painter, this produced faces-substances, those of Hamilcar, of Shahabarim, of Spendius, and of the young Hannibal. And lastly, the puffed face of Mâtho, filling the whole frame, which advances toward the distraught face of Salammbô, who faints. "Figures", in the most epic of senses.

So solid are those faces that the artist finally resorted to the pure pigments of pastel, and thus created six "esperpentos", of an almost mineral substance. We know how Heinrich Schliemann must have felt when, as he was excavating the site of Troy, he suddenly faced the mask of Agamemnon. The painter seems to have gone through the same stupefaction as she faced the Carthaginian masks embedded in Flaubert's consonants and vowels.

Flaubert's narrative elicits the same compactness as do the figures. Mâtho advances in an aqueduct whose ground slopes upward while its roof slants downwards as he walks on. Micheline Lo retained the narrowing, the maximal orgasm of the narrative, that moment when the Barbarians, lured by the Cathaginians in the Thermopylae, end up being crushed there in a lake of stones and blood which is in continuation of the one where Saint Antoine had walked. The Bataille du Makar are mineral and visual crushes in pure state.

In the hall where the works were first shown, this Flaubertian suffocation strangely appeared next to Giovanni Bellini's Young Woman at Her Toilet, the most tenderly irradiating painting of Western art. A self-portrait furtively hung there? Or was it to indicate that the truth in the cerebral landscape demands that one should go to the two extremes at the same time? And to all that is in between. Flaubert and Bellini. The Carthaginian, and the Venetian.

1994: Cien años de soledad. The system of portraits

Finally, among the cerebral landscapes, the absolute convexity of Flaubert found a counterpart in the absolute concavity of Gabriel García Márquez. This time, no "characters" would effect any action inside a landscape or release any imaginary into the real. Only the immensity of the Amazonia and the Cordillera, causing action and country, imaginary and real, to be fused into the Colombian mammagallo (feminine-masculine, uterus-clitoris). Proper names no longer designate men and women, but human bodies, made up of trees, rocks, animals, streams, rough gestures, delusions. "Aureliano Segundo había satisfecho por fin su sueño de disfrazarse de tigre (to disguise himself as a tiger) y andaba feliz entre la muchedumbre desaforada (the madding crowd)." García Márquez's disfrazarse is an echo to Carlos Fuentes's esperpanto.

Each word then becomes an oracle, so that the suite of twenty-six portraits open and close on Melquiades, the magus who owns the people's manuscripts, its Poppol Vuh, but refuses to translate them because no one is to apprehend their meaning until a hundred years of non-time of the Continento Eterno — about which his Colombian friend, Heriberto López Pérez, had written his Sueños Epifanias y Porros — have elapsed: "pero se negó a traducir los manuscritos. Nadie debe conocer su sentido mientras no hayan cumplido cien años explicó." Unless some particular circumstance should tear the veil, as for Aureliano Babilonia: "No porque io hubiera paralizado el estupor, sino porque en aquel instante prodigioso se le revelaron las claves definitivas de Melquíades."

Micheline Lo deciphered twenty-six figures of warm and humid earth, of human flesh, of animal skin, of vegetal arborescence, of cryptic texts, cramming the sheet on which they were drawn, each time somewhat off center to the left as if to say they were to be viewed and read from left to right. Figures, and narrations. Based on Amazonian coalescences, the drawings were made directly on an embossed board of bark-brown color. Those compact masses she chose to frame with solid, square-shaped wood of varying patinas, according to the web of the rain forest and to human traits.

Those portraits were the last which Micheline Lo painted as an explorer of cerebral landscapes. They open a new era of faces. Picasso made a last self-portrait in 1972, in which he fulgurates by the explosion of his look. But in this, he does not depart from the traditional Western vision of an Ego, of a "someone", of a "certain". He concludes a world. Micheline Lo's portraits inaugurate a radically different vision: that of the biochemical brains, inexhaustibly plural, both exogenous and endogenous.

She therefore successively explored

(1) The ecstatic portraits of Saint Antoine

(2) The beatific portraits of the elects of the Paradiso

(3) The essentializing (Mallarmean) portraits of the Tombeaux

(4) The scarecrow (esperpentos) portraits of Terra Nostra

(5) The infernal portraits of the Enfer de Genet

(6) The archeological (Schliemannian) portraits of Salammbô

(7) The mutational portraits of Cien años de soledad, in which the organisms are relays of Evolution and Universe.

1995: The transition: Vents de Saint John Perse

Flexte, as did the narration both copied and figured of La Mort d'Harcamone, already had disclosed her intention of crossing the written and the depicted. But not to such a point that the pictorial line be at the same time the scriptive line, and vice versa. There remained a final step to take.

Naturally, she needed a writer whose work would lend itself to this. She chose Saint-John Perse. Born in the French Antilles, those Amerindian islands, French ambassador and poet, Perse precisely had made as his central theme the generation and regeneration of animals, humans, ideas, images, political and commercial institutions, of fervent brains. "Se hâter, se hâter, paroles de vivants". Micheline Lo liked to repeat the last verse of Vents, which adequately expressed her own violence: "Quand la violence / eut renouvelé / le lit des hommes sur la terre // Un très vieil arbre / à sec de feuilles / reprit le fil / de ses maximes // Et un autre arbre / de haut rang / montait déjà / des grandes Indes souterraines // Avec sa feuil/le magnéti/que et son chargement / de fruits nouveaux." It will have been noted that, just as Claudel, his contemporary, Perse expresses himself in verses made up of sections of four or six feet, sometimes forming decameters (4/6, 6/4) and alexandrines (6/6). According, as he says, to Pindar's ideal of the strophe, both strict and broad.

As discipline is the condition of liberty, the painter imposed on herself a strict protocol. She decided to copy each verse from bottom to top, starting again from the bottom when she had reached the top. She used her colors according to an arbitrary code: a given color for a given alternation of strophes. Yet, her brush, loaded with acrylic paint, caused insistences, ruminations of syllables, letters, or lines. In this manner, snags, faults, or slips resequenced the sequences. Yet another way of using the canvas as a field of indices, of making it the privileged site of neuronal connections an cleavages. The workplace was really ready for the Chemin des écritures. For the passage from neuronal formations to the living formations in general.

Chapter 4 – SECOND COSMOLOGICAL PRELUDE: THE LIVING FORMATIONS

With the Chemins des écritures, we have to go beyond the field of brains, and to introduce a new cosmological interlude, this time on living formations in general. The word "formation" had to be taken in its active sense. What is concerned here is not the forms as a result of an act of forming, according to one of the meanings of "formation" in French ("des formations rocheuses"), but rather the process through which forms are obtained. The German language is clearer in this respect, as it makes a distinction between Gestalt (form) and Gestaltung (formation, the act of forming). Gestaltung, and not Gestalt, properly translates the word formation(s) here.

Until recently, traditional painting attempted to produce forms, more precisely, perfect forms, exemplary and archetypal, so much so that Michelangelo destroyed almost all of his sketches. And when Picasso deforms, it is to produce new forms. Now, what interested Micheline Lo, as other contemporary cosmogonists, who like her had become radically evolutionists, was to offer a perception and an experience of the formation processes, of morphogeneses, those movements and logics of our contemporary Universe. We chose here five of those new paradigms, the first three of which are ontological, the fourth, epistemological, and the fifth, almost ethical.

4A. Dynamic evolutive (re)sequenciations

The miracle of the twenty amino acids which, from the time of the sulfur gases from the volcanoes on the floor of the oceans, carry the edifice of the Living, is that it is made of two parts. One is identical in all organisms, and electrically polarized, thereby enabling the formation of solid chains, while the other makes them different. As a result, when those acids make up chains of a few dozens or a few thousands, amino acids attract and repel each other depending on how distant they are, but also because of their virtualities of chemical bindings (covalent, ionic, hydrogenic, or hydrophobic). Hence, the resulting pellets, called proteins (proteios, of prime importance), are infinitely varied.

The discovery of formations through (re)sequencing was to shake the human mind more violently than anything before. From the beginning, an angularizing, orthogonalizing and transversalizing primate must assume that any formation inevitably resulted from molding and plasticity. Yahweh Himself had created Adam from modeled clay. Now, having discovered proteins that resulted from the (re)sequencing of amino acids, Homo had gained a first understanding that what happened at the start (variant) of living formations was not related to a plastic process.

4B. Ultrastructures

However, even after Hermann E. Fisher (who, for this, received the Nobel Prize for chemistry in 1902) had found that proteins could assemble by a key-and-lock effect between their active sites — which assigned them anatomical and physiological functions — there remained to be found some intermediary between their very open biochemical reactions and the relatively closed organic units formed by the cells responsible for both organs and organisms. These are organelles such as the mitochondria that stock and provide cell energy. Since 1939, histologists have called these ultrastructures, for the reason that powerful microscopes were needed to observe them, unlike structures and textures.

4C. Organizations by geometric, topological, mechanical and hydrodynamic constraints

Was there a way to proceed from the still evasive preformations made up of proteins and of organelles (almost level with proteins), to the organs of our living organisms? As early as 1920 D'Arcy Thompson noted that when the form of a fish has been geometrically framed in a grid, rather simple anamorphoses help find the shape of other fishes, as would as many geometrical variations of the same theme. The same approach could be applied to other animal families. To understand morphogenesis, then, one could evoke morphogenetic fields, obligated epigenetic pathways — chreodes, as Conrad Waddington would later call them.

In the 1950s, René Thom found the mathematical foundations of this. He received a Fields Medal for establishing that equations of differential topology point to seven elementary "catastrophes" (strophein kata, transform through and through), via "singularities", i.e. points in space-time where the curve of space-time becomes infinite. We touched on this earlier when talking of El Greco. They are (1) the crease, (2) the fold, (3) the dovetail, (4) the butterfly wing, and (5-7) the three types of umbilicus: hyperbolic, elliptic, and parabolic. With the mind of an embryologist, Thom added, in 1972 in Stabilité structurelle et morphogenèse (Benjamin), that those seven catastrophes helped understand that living tissues, both fibers and fibrated, then produce organs: tracts (digestive, vaginal), pouches (urinary, stomachal, uterine), as well as their angulations and articulations.

The foregoing views have been supplemented or even completed by the work of a number of biophysicians. Some are concerned with the regeneration of organs — how to remake a bladder, a vagina, a lung, or a liver — as for example Vincent Fleury (De l'œuf à l'éternité, Flammarion, 2006), and they state that every cell has its movement, say south-north as would a compass needle, and that in this manner the disc (the pancake) of cells that are the starting point of a living organism, has an identical movement, suggesting that of a magnetic field. From the gastrular stage, the height of the navel (site of gastrulation) on that general south-north axis results in radiolars when the navel-mouth-anus axis is central, of quadrupeds when its position is lower. What is more, under the same laws of mechanics and hydrodynamics, in these initial distributions there will appear creases, bulges, windings, which will become arms and legs, and even fingers (Vincent Fleury, Des pieds et des mains, Flammarion, 2003).

In sum, a living organism is varied, variable and variant by reason of its biochemistry, which contributes to the expansion of the narrowing of the fibers of its fibrated, or even to their thriving or their degenerating — the extended neck of a giraffe, or the shortened one of a mouse. But this does not mean that an infinite number of organisms will be possible — probable and possible will be four fins, four legs, two legs and two arms, two legs and two wings; improbable and impossible (?) will be four legs and two wings (the mythological Centaur still remains a fantastic animal). No head will appear beyond a head, since it is the final spherical bulge in those animals that have a lowered umbilicus, as we human have. As she died early in 2003, Micheline Lo was never aware of those biophysical developments. But they are in continuation of the geometrical and topological views of both D'Arcy Thompson and René Thom, with which she was familiar.

4D. Non-finality. Modules and network. Individuation vs. individual subject. Metastability. Initiative of the digital.

Such a spreading of the living implies changes in paradigms that can be grouped together because they are faces of one another. (a) The conventional scheme "purposes >> functions >> forms >> organs >> elements" has been reversed to "elements (amino acids, proteins) >> organelles >> forms-organs >> functions >> purposes". (b) The forgoing shows that no organism is ever fully a whole, as held in Ancient Greece, or an individual as in the 17th century, and that there are only individuation processes which sometimes between birth and death are congruous enough for us to be able to speak of a specimen of a species. (c) The integral parts of a classical "whole", a kidney, a lung, or a foot, assume the status of functional parts or modules, that may intervene in different organisms. A fortiori we will speak of nodules with respect to biochemical cycles such as ATP, or that of chymotripsine, that may be involved in various organisms, as well as effect certain functions in that same organism give or take a few variations. (d) Sets made up of nodules are not so much wholes with a center as networks with multiple centers. (e) As a result, the distinction in new biology is less of the stable and the unstable than of the metastable, i.e. of the states where transformations do not yet appear under the formations, but sufficiently prepare for this so that they come out in bursts, "quantum"-like. (f) The technical invention sequence "analogy (the general motion of a Guimbal turbine) >> digitality (detailed calculation of its energy exchanges)" is often reversed into "digital >> analogic".

A number of those characteristics have been pointed out by Gilbert Simondon in Du mode d'existence des objets techniques (1957), and L'individu et sa genèse physico-biologique (1964). Micheline Lo knew the two books, and she even taught a few classes in an arts school on François Jacob's La logique du vivant.

4E. The Universe as an adventure

In this view, the future state of a living system is unpredictable by reason of its incessant cellular variations, in spite of its embryologic, geometric, topological, and physical invariants. And yet, this unpredicted state can perfectly well be explained from the moment it arises. Is there a simple, vehicular word to describe that situation?

Not the Greek tukHè evoked by Freud and Monod, which Aristotle said designates the meeting (tunkHanein, to meet) of heterogenous series, as those of a stone falling off a roof, and of a passer-by whose skull it smashes. Nor is it chance, from the Latin vulgate (cadentia, from cadere, to fall) — the fall of a circumstance that "drops" as a good or bad Fortuna (fors, forse, perhaps). Nor the Arabic hazard, a throw of dice (al rahr) selecting an element in a closed inventory (one side from among the six sides of a die) which caused Pascal to conceive a probability theory to calculate the shares in the win of an interrupted game. Nor the accuracy ranges in a physics experiment, in Newton's theory of errors. Nor even the Markov process, which since the 1920s has applied to a subject walking and to the Brownian motion.

What word, then, could adequately describe such antecedent unpredictability, and consequent deducibility? Perhaps "adventure" in the strong sense of "something that occurs" (ad, venire), which makes that the novel has become the preponderant literary genre of our time, having superseded epopee, lyricism, tragedy, and comedy, irresistibly influencing history. Our evolution, that combines bushiness (biochemical and ultrastructural) and invariants (biophysical), and which therefore at the same time broadens and channels that of Darwin, would thus place us in an adventurous Universe. For living organisms, and adventurous painters. Given a new logic. And also for some ethic that would no longer be that of perfection, but of wondering wonderment.

Chapter 5 - THE LIVING FORMATION AND WRITING

How can the spatial arts echo those five paradigms? In architecture, there is some impediment in the heaviness of the materials, even though they become legible in the work of Frank Gehry — inchoatively in his Gugenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain; and patently in his project for the Louis Vuitton Foundation for Creation building in Paris. In sculpture, the same paradigms have certainly carried Enzo Cucchi and Tony Cragg, in spite of a similar resistance of not very pliable materials. Painting is favored by lightness of means, as well as by its proximity to writing which could be convoked inasmuch as the analogic no longer always precedes the digital.

5A. The living formations and writing as such

Writing formations, even ancient, are close to the newer living formations owing to a number of their properties.

1. Like proteins, they have distinct units and several levels. (a) First they have a number of characters — a few thousands in China, and around thirty in our alphabets. (b) These characters are made up of stokes and lines — a few strokes are enough to produce all the Chinese ideograms, while the characters of the Western or Arabic alphabets have upstrokes, downstrokes, round, open, and closed shapes, that run above or below the writing line.

2. Writings often display ligatures or set spaces causing the characters to be joined, at least by some of their parts, and to differ by some other parts, as do amino acids. This follows three dynamics: (a) a graphic dynamic — downstrokes, upstrokes, angular or round hand, above or below the writing line, etc. (b) a phonic dynamic, because once they have been pronounced they are low- or high-pitched, with definite or indefinite formants, up to the twelve phonematic strokes of Jakobson-Halle. (c) a semantic dynamic, because once understood, they are linked to semes that are fluid or compact, centripetal or centrifugal, appreciative or depreciative, etc.

3. Writings are a living thematization of interactions between analogy and digitality. Initially, they were essentially pictograms, which soon were schematized and digitalized — in Egypt, when they became partially alphabetic; in Sumer, when they underwent a 90 degree rotation to follow the scriptive motion. Conversely, abstract (digitalized) written signs immediately took on analogic meanings by reason of their graphic and optical convections. As in the history of our capital "A". First, with its point down (hence upside down for us) it was the analogy of the head of an ox. Then, pointing upward (as it is today), it became a digital sign. Finally, in view of the isosceles force it assumes in this position, it took on the majesty of the "A" de l'Atlantique of the cartoonist Fred, who again works analogically. Once again, in the living formation, the morphogenetic, mathematical and physical invariants are more often analogical, while the chemical (re)sequenciation variants are more digital.

4. Right from the time of counting tokens of the Neolithic, writing records inventories and exchanges (so many cattle for so many bags of grain), thus confirming the artisanal consecution: functions (transactions) >> organs (graphic expressions). Very soon, however — with the emergence of the primary empires, around 3000 B.C. — , writing suscitates unknown themes once it has to support the award of titles, royal victories, or religious invocations. The consecution then becomes organs >> functions.

5. Finally, ligatures in the broad sense of the word (connective and disjunctive strokes, periods, jump to the next line, capitalization, or set spaces) suggest the chemical bindings of amino chains, and especially cerebral connections and cleavages with which they share at least six performances: (1) they convey information in the etymological sense (formare, in — put in shape); (2) they collect information through the weaving, crossing, entangling, and intensities of their connection; (3) they accentuate the information, as do our sensory nervous systems, reinforcing what is already salient, smoothing down the less salient; (4) they split the information through cuts — themselves an accentuation — between the information batches, boxes, and modules; (5) they help short-, medium-, and long-term learning, and (6) they foment, at the time of storage and re-reading, innovative cerebral digestions.

5B. Living formations and calligraphy

Left to themselves, however, graphic formations lack several of the properties of living formations. As lines, strokes and characters, they display two layers only, while chemical living formations have more. They are not self-generating, and imply and intentional writer. Of themselves, they do not generate a regenerative, but only a reproductive memory. Nothing in them invokes the notion of ultrastructure. How, then, could the few lines and characters of writing make a pertinent cosmogonic echo to the cosmology of living formations?

However, since a writing is made up of lines, it can be the site, as would a painting, of fixating, kinetic, dynamic, and even uncoordinatable perceptive-motor field effects ("excited" as understood by Thom). Or yet again, of logical-semiotic field effects. Both these aspects can then be exploited by rhythm, which is particular to Homo, in order to express or realize specific topology, cybernetics, logical semiotics, or presentivity, i.e. the destiny/life choice of an individual subject or of a people, or again their work subject. Such were the calligraphies-paintings of the emperors of the Song Dynasty in the 11th-12th Chinese centuries, or that of Arabic Kufic calligraphy.

5C. Of painted writings since 1950

Many were those in the 1950s who learned that amino acids were spontaneously formed in an earthy environment, thus bridging the gap between the inanimate and the animate, and also that the (re)sequencing of amino acids was a principle of living formation. At that time, too, Jackson Pollock introduced the technique of cross dripping, and the resulting formations were as little intentional and as much self-generating as could be. Yet, it covered the painted canvas with many modules and networks, and few or no forms.

In 1955, in the same cosmological climate, Jasper Johns took three aspects of writing as a subject: individual characters, lines, and columns, especially when he arranged in abacus form the letters of the alphabet. A genial valorizing artist, he thus sufficiently enriched these structures to evoke, among them, a network not only of textures but of generative ultrastructures. Still, his system overlooks the potentialities of (re)sequencing.

In the 1960s, Lucia Di Luciano introduced the subject of (re)sequencing. Her alba elettronica is proof enough of how dazzled she was by perceptive-motor and logic-semiotic field effects, generated by the simple data processing "bit" (flip/flop, 0/1, black/white) even from its most elementary disposition, as a rectangle, provided the potentials of (re)sequencing could be exploited. But her initial small rectangles were perhaps too elementarily digital, not dynamic and analogical enough, to move from the structure and texture field effects over to those of ultrastructures (histological).

In 1966, moving another step toward living formations, Jean Dubuffet's Cycle de L'Hourloupe offered a pictorial cell of the living organism that is both very plastic (analogizing) and very much written (digitalizing), which mixes cuts of the mineral matter, of the living tissue and living organ, of the expression of faces. His work consists in multiplying this cell into sequences that proliferate to the edges of the frame. But in this case, the idea of (re)sequencing is missing. As does that of ultrastructure in a very smooth loom.

In 1969, David Lipszyg produced, precisely in Micheline Lo's house, his Proposition 1. On a substrate of 5.25 feet square, he placed squares of 0.3 x 0.3 feet, which amazingly recall certain biochemical constructions — (1) Each one carries five elements: (a) straight lines, (b) arcs of circles, (c) hues, (d) saturations, and (e) luminance (// The five elements of amino acids??). — (2) Those elements form some twenty different compounds (//The twenty amino acids retained by the living organisms??). — (3) Those initial compounds, through their dynamic seriations, form highly diversifiable vertical and horizontal plastic compounds (// Pictorial proteins??). — (4) Those higher-order compounds, through combination, generate a "proposition" (// A pictorial organism??). — (5) Propositions form, among themselves, affine groups (// Pictorial "species", "genera", "families", and "orders"?). — (6) In order to clearly show that they are (re)sequentiable the squares, initially made of cardboard and pasted on, later were made of aluminum and attached by magnetic force, hence inviting mutation.

From 1970, the very year Christian Anfinsen demonstrated the folding and unfolding of the protein, Frank Stella who thus far had only painted fixed graphic sequences started painting sequences in mutation. First the wooden beams of Synagogues polonaises, the Polish synagogues turned to rubble during WW II. Then those that explode in the organs of the living organisms (Albatros, etc.) Yet all his sequences, although dynamic, failed to manifest generation, and even less self-regeneration. Would this be for the reason that his painting never exploited the properties of writing, in spite of the example of Jasper Johns who was, however, Stella's painter of reference?

Lastly, by a strange coincidence Micheline Lo and Jean-Claude Goffre had since 1980 their workrooms only a short distance apart in the village of Le Poët-Sigillat. Goffre was first a photographer and he probably had been molded by the framing, subframing, and reframing potentialities of photography; he practiced a pictorial protocol that was exemplary for a cosmogony of the living formations. — (1) Gather a batch of haphazard images: magazine photographs, or from the painter's own paintings. — (2) Cut these structures into rectangular fragments, from which they assume the status of ultrastructures. — (3) Paste these ultrastructural elements in (re)sequentiating columns and lines. — (4) Perform this operation according to the demands of perceptive-motor and logic-semiotic field effects, paying particular attention to general and differential topology, and to the fecundity of fractals. In this manner, he obtained not objects-before but networks of interfaces where the connections and cleavages of the artist's and his viewers' brains cross. The subject of the work is decided enough to allow for the pertinence of accurate placing — in the Bouches-du-Rhône, and in particular in the Camargue. Without any fear of rubbing shoulders with the abstractions of "Tissus Mémoires".

Chapter 6 – LES CHEMINS DES ÉCRITURES

Micheline Lo's Chemins des écritures (1996-1999) is a suite of some fifty wide-shaped canvasses, approximately ten square feet in surface — some are somewhat broader, and only three exceed forty square feet (6.5 x 7.5 feet). On first impression, the eye catches fragments of figures, letters, geometric and topological forms, body members and organs, efflorescences and rhizomes, the size of which varies between four and twelve inches square. They could be said to be "plastic cells" as understood by Weidlé, i.e. portions of a work where the destinies-designs of the work as a whole can be found.

6A. The trait

Yet, the eye cannot rest on anything. None of the elements glimpsed are there for their own sake. It has no contour and no part. It is not an event placed next to another event. It is not even a segment before or after another segment, as in the polymeric cells of Dubuffet's Cycle de l'Hourloupe.

To the contrary, everything happens as if the eye were caught in each portion of surface and there read — or at least suspected — some underlying elements, so that, as it catches that particular portion, it also catches the one that comes next, or before, or above, or below. These are not data, but sequences in the strong sense of the word. What is to be seen are not the Generated, but the Generation. And less the generation of one by the other than a Self-generation which enables to apprehend the one and the other, the other and the same. There are therefore no specimens and no species, even, but the generating principles of the species and specimens. Structures and textures, while not negated, are thus never accomplished, nor even definable or discernable, hardly namable. Their exposure, decided but transitory, is there only to create a perception of the work of those ultrastructures of which they are the transient, metastable emergences. Hence, no forms, only formations. In sum, each painting in its own way achieves the same theme: the generalized biological, technical and semiotic Generation.

To fulfill this, the drawing leans on the properties of writing in that the emerging elements, instead of lending themselves to a one-by-one identification, are rather like characters disposed in sequences that would reveal the strokes from which they follow, with the result that the sequences at once come out as (re)sequentiating, as each character already turns into another one, which will in turn become another one. This, from all around, causes singularities that are not so much individuals (non-divided) as relays of individuation, as understood by Simondon. And those relays are not singly describable, narrable, countable, since they are transitions and metamorphoses. Far from all dialectic, there is nothing predictable beforehand, while nothing is either explainable afterwards.

The singularities thus produced are uncountably multiple and diverse by reason of the fecundity of the process from which they originate, i.e. the dynamic (re)sequenciations. But they are so, too, because they continue to remain elementary, staying on the level of the digit, the stroke, and in particular of the seven catastrophes of differential topology: crease, fold, dovetail, butterfly wing, and the three types of umbilicus: hyperbolic, elliptic, and parabolic; or yet again on the level of the prime principles of mechanics and hydraulics. As a result, they carry everything that is primary in the anatomy and physiology of the living, as in geometry, algebra, the written character, the element, the object and the technical process, the technical gesture. By reason of this elementarity, each painting often seems to comprise as many actual or virtual signs as did the whole history of images, or even more.

In as much as the stroke or the spot stay under the formation, the least digitalizable deviation suggests a new form of analogy, while all analogy keeps inducing a fresh digitalization. With, however, — as in any phenomenon that is akin to writing — a certain predominance of the digital over the analogic. For, while it is true that in this case there are never any departure or arrival but only relays between anterior and posterior potentialities, such relays could not be distinctly analogic, or they would give rise to narrations and descriptions, which are not to the point. Therefore, the digital initiates the first groupings, of which the still abstract dynamism suggests more concrete analogies, that are in turn again disseminated.

This gives a pictorial echo to the revolution recently brought about by biology, in the sense of Physis, or Prime Generation. Since the beginning of time, Physis had been supposed to work following imagetic copies (Yahweh makes Adam "[a] man in our image, after our likeness"), or metamorphoses, or scissiparities of the same, or detachments of the same, or reciprocal conversion (the yi of the yin/yang), in sum all sorts of processes governed by the One, and where, as a result, there is never anything more in the effect than in the cause. Such is the traditional causality, source of constant and consistent ontology and epistemology, and ultimately perceivable, in part by the creatures, and wholly by Providence, Allah, the Tao, the Dharma, the Polynesian Mana and Kamo, the Mexican Quik (thick blood). But we showed earlier that at least five characters of current living formations depart from this view. Prominent there are the quantic effects. Binding is replaced by start, rerouting, triggering. The process is never strictly plastician, i.e. made up of previously imagined continuities (plattein — to model, imagine).

This is indeed what this painted writing, or rather scriptive painting makes us share. Articulation is no longer punctuation of a totality or of integrant parts, but rather emergences in ubiquitory overlappings, where one can no longer continuously point to an instant-point where A generates B, or where B is distinct from A. One has in mind non-commutative geometries, involving (self-)regulations of elements as much as simply elements.

6B. The color

With this in mind, color must be just as revolutionary as the drawing, since it could no longer work in contrastive layers — as in the Flemish primitives, or Piero della Francesca, or even David Hockney — nor be simply valorizing, as in De Koninck or Jasper Johns.

Color must also be triggering and overlapping, working by rerouting, sequence, sequenciation, resequenciation, positive and negative reactions, feedback and feedforward. And yet, unpredictable. The expletive, "What colors", often elicited by the first contact with this form of painting is not caused by the surprise of broad differences sensed in a single view, but by the partial surprises, in leaps, in formative singularities, generative and self-generated in their leaping. Someone trying to be more specific would usually say, "And then", "Oh, and then", "Ah, and now", and the like. Color that traces and branches off, down to its science values. Released or else flattened to be, in turn, generative, ultrastructural.

Surprisingly seen in Mexican color, which is never that of an object, but that of some force behind, before or among objects, which are then only relays of that force.

6C. Of the superimposing distribution

The more so as, in such a system, composition gives way to superimposition. All forms of arts, at all events since Çatalhöyük, until then had com-posed, i.e. put together (ponere, cum) previously defined elements in a space-time, also defined, or predefined; this derived from that structure par excellence that is the frame, the framing. Even Dubuffet, in his metamerizations of L'Hourloupe, knows that at one moment he will reach four edges where he will have to stop, bearing in mind that edges attract and repel, and that therefore they are the ultimate referential of the perceptivo-motor and logic-semiotic field effects of a painting.

But in our case, the edges are no longer stop lines to expansion, but lines of reflux. The are the ensemble of the space-time points from which the previously produced graphic and colored (re)sequenciations continue by reverting to themselves (this is what began as the copies of Saint-John Perse's Vent went along), in some sorts of close or distant folds, and more often distant rather than close. For each time we were given to glimpse Micheline Lo's brush strokes, they were just as leaping at a distance and in all directions as those of the Impressionists, of Bonnard, or Chagal.

With this, superimposition itself changed its nature. In previously composed painting, Micheline Lo usually displayed changes in design, global or local. Our x-rays reveal subjects initially on the left who have moved to the right, even if the first layer was finally used as a substrate for the new. Now, in the Chemins des écritures, superimposition (right> <left, top> <bottom, above> <below) is a continuation of the same design but in reverse, or retreat. It is the generalized dynamic (re)sequenciation that goes on, flowing back to its previous states, thereby indexing other ultrastructures of those states. The return then multiplies on the whole the graphic and colored irruptions (suddenness, emergence), with a global prevalence of singularities over generalities, and — this needs stressing — of the digital over the analogic.

For those reasons, ultimately, the energy of the project finds its origin mainly in the dimension of depth. Painters are people of few words, but one thing Micheline Lo kept repeating was that "it has to go on and retreat at the same time". The pictorial cell is first circumscribed here by this pulsing. One will have understood what acrylic paint was indispensable, as it dries fast enough to allow a distinction of the layers while not excluding their conpenetrations and crossing, to lay a fresh accent on the ultrastructures.

A comparison with music will be helpful here. Admittedly Bach's music is almost antipodal to the Bushy Evolution of our biologists. What mattered for a musician contemporary with Leibniz was to express the Multiple of the One while saving the One in a supreme realization, through sound, of the Western monotheistic eternity. Yet a number of Bach's counterpoints, as Contrapunctus 8 in Die Kunst der Fuge, make their progression by sound handles, formed by a sequence of notes bunched together in chords that are more horizontal than vertical, with the end of a handle at the same time being the beginning of the next, in what could be termed harmonic curves, or modal scrolls, thereby creating a melodic harmony as opposed to Mozart's "accompanied melody". Now, these sound handles (Scherring would take his pulse before playing the Grande Chacone) throw some lights on the curved visual handles that cause the pulsing of the pictorial cells of the Chemins des écritures. It is significant that jazz musicians in the 1960s would play Bach between their own improvisations at the Newport Festival.

6D. Cerebral landscape in motion

David Hubel tell us that he was amazed to discover, in the 1960s, that the colors, forms, and movements of the objects of our vision were carried by nervous pathways that are distinct and nowhere totalized. Others have investigated the selections, accentuations, and redistributions done by our visual nerve relays — ganglia, thalamus, and brain areas. In 1982, David Marr, in his work Vision, offered an initial computational program of the stages which retinal data, first blurred, incomplete or too complete, need to go through to finally result in a 3-dimensional "perceived", after a stage which, he said, was "2.5-dimensional".

This pertains to the eternal painter whose vision, since the cave age, goes back to those moments of an object when it has not yet been fully defined but is still under cerebral construction. It may even be assumed that for any major painter Marr's computational stages have specific particularities, for example that of being slower or faster, more hesitating, more accentuated, at all events more exploratory and explorable than in the ordinary man. Yet, for the rational Occident, such stages were taken as a prerequisite, which were more or less shaded off or erased from the final result. Or they might be maintained, but in states that were at least stabilized by contours that negated perspective, as with Joan Miró, or by modulation of luminance, as with Cézanne.

In the Chemins de écritures, one should as far as possible move among those preliminary perceptive stages inasmuch as generation (self-generation) as such is concerned, with its ultrastructures lying beneath structures and textures. The neuronal landscape is part of the pictorial theme, as is the landscape of the living. The painting is then genetic on two counts: in the perceived, i.e. the living formations; and in the perception, i.e. the neuronal reticulations, with in both cases the same importance for the quantic rerouting. The notion of interface is present everywhere, in so far as there is no ontological and epistemological fracture between the perceived and the perceiving, unlike in the matter/spirit dualism. They both have the same behavior, working by releases, and by "punctuated equilibria" (S. J. Gould). They invite to reading in graphs rather than geometries as in traditional Western art, or in pulses as in traditional non-Western art.

6E. From contemplation to perceptive and hermeneutic effervescence

Let us now situate this experience within that of art in general. Homo is a physical, physiological, technical and semiotic organism subjected at every instant to very diverse and heterogeneous stimuli that form as many pools of attraction that trigger, among themselves, field effects. As a technician and semiotician, he experiences for himself logic-semiotic field effects, while sharing with other animals perceptive-motor field effects that are fixating, kinematical, dynamic and "excited" (René Thom).

While other animals have no use for "excited" field effects which would hamper their action, Homo by contrast takes pleasure in thematizing them in rhythm, for then they help him neutralize general functionings for a time, thus eliciting the presence (apparition, apparitionality, autostranslucency) that accompanies certain functionings. Such is the role of euphoria induced by drink and drugs, dances as those of fakirs, the orgasmic caress and paraorgasmic experiences, certain hypnotic prayers, and chiefly works of art — poetry, dance, music, architecture, sculpture, painting. Craving for pure presence Homo will indulge in rhythm to ecstasy. An animal is not rhythmical, not even the ape rocking to and fro and which simply responds to a Baldwin reaction (perception >> movement >> perception).

In art, the ancient chiefly tried to be contemplative, to hold many things together, as in the sight or the unifying pathway of a temple (contemplare, templum, cum). The West sought to go from parts to wholes, with the hope of a consented rest, of a Spinozian "acquiescence" in the Whole of wholes. This was so as late as Renoir and Cézanne, and even Mondrian. The perceiving stood in front of the work, dominating and integrating it. But the look that meets the Chemin des écritures is no longer in front of anything, but is physically and cerebrally in its midst, an activity among activities, with no attempt as with DaVinci to attain the sight of the embracing God but to identify as far as can be with the Universe of which he is a state-moment.

Contemplation has been replaced by mental, or rather neuronal, effervescence, introducing another form of the sacred. The ancient sacred was exemplaristic and eager for stability and the dazzle of the Eternal and the Expected. The new form of the sacred, apart from the mechanical and hydrodynamic invariants, meets infinite "singularities", an "inexhaustible alterity", a "once, never more", the "explainable only in hindsight". A Chemin des écritures — in that it assembles metastable states, is wrought by its ultrastructures, its (re)sequenciation reflux, its secret graphs, and its interfaces of perceiving and perceived — is the most intense and the most "Universal" brain activator that one can conceive.

Micheline Lo was very much aware of this, and on a loose sheet she noted, "Chemin des écritures: multiple signs in interactions launched into space-time: diverse cultures, signs of every category stored in order or disorder, embarked not on a Ship of Fools but on a voyage across the Universe where they will perhaps be deciphered and reconditioned under a new logic of which we have no premonition."

Chapter 7 – THE FULFILLMENTS OF THE CHEMIN DES ÉCRITURES

As the subject of her work had led to so fundamental a phenomenon as the paradigms of living formations, the painter was bound never to depart from it. But what came after the Chemins des écritures were no mere "Variations" or even "Developments", but rather "Transformations" as understood by the older Beethoven, the one who composed the 33 Transformationen on a theme by Diabelli.

1997: L'astronome

Before the living formations came the stars and galaxies. It behooved a cosmogonist of our time to attempt, if only for a moment, to apprehend the sky, the origin of origins. Not to recount the stories of gods, as did the Ancient mythologists and astrologers. Nor even to savor the harmony which, as Kant saw it, confirmed the connivance between the World and the Spirit. But sufficiently to alarm oneself at the preformations before any formation.

We tend to believe that, from the start of our universe, there were not forms, nor even atoms, but as yet unqualified Energy. The question since the year 2000 (Rees, Weinberg, 2000) has been whether our Universe would not be simply a specific solution to a Multiverse, for example with respect to the speed of light, the charge of an electron, etc., which as a result would cease to be universal constants sensu stricto.

How can a cosmogonist echo those moments so distant from our own bodies, even though we have known since 1963 that they move within an isotropic radiation of 2.7°K, fossil of the big bang? Indeed, as a master of perceptive-motor and logic-semiotic field effects, every painter is akin to the heroes of today's cosmic tragedy whose names are Collisions, Fusions, Fissions, Ejections, Annihilations, Dilations, Expansions, General Entropy, and Partial Negentropies, states that are close to and distant from the Equilibrium, not forgetting those Singularities which Stephen Hawking called points of space-time where the curve of space-time becomes infinite.

The painter is not lost for words before the eternal silence of those infinites spaces that so frightened Pascal, on condition that the perceiving cerebral landscape take precedence over the perceived landscape. As a result, paintings on that subject could not be titled "The Sky", nor even "Astronomy", but simply and exactly L'Astronome (The Astronomer). Each painting propounds protoperceptions, something of the "2.5-dimension" according to David Marr (see above), and recalling Malevitch for whom speeds, because they keep being so fast, end up being immobile.

1998: Les traités de paix

On the other hand, one does not get involved in Self-generation of the living, and then in that of the Universe, without realizing that any generation means the existence of Conflict, that War which Heraclitus called "the father of all things", or recalling that conflicts are resolved through transient compromises that are the metastable moments (Simondon) of the compatibilizing Evolution of rocks, plants, animals, tools, and signs. In sum, in the beginning of the beginnings there are The Conflict and The Pact. The Traités de paix were probably the most liberated creations of Micheline Lo, who no longer needed be concerned with any particular circumstance. She was then open to pure contrasts, unifications, numerations, topologies, i.e. the pleasure of painting almost without any program, and an acquiescence to the basal movement of things.

As she was deeply troubled by the predicament of Palestine, she painted about ten Traités de Guerre which she ended up destroying because the subject was either not suited to a painter of generations, or was too narrowly historic to lend itself to cosmogonic intentions. Or perhaps the Traités de paix were comprehensive enough to have included, besides the Pact, the essential moves of the Traités de guerre which were thus deprived of their proper substance.

1998-1999: Le bestiaire

A modern-day Bestiary is not an Atlas of zoology, but an array of animal figures on which both author and viewer have asked the following questions:

(a) What are the topologies, mechanics, and hydromechanics according to which living formations, within a given environment, can develop anatomies and physiologies that are sufficiently stable to constitute relatively viable, recognizable, and reproducible species?

(b) Each species formation is a manner of practically distributing a portion of a World-around, an Umwelt (von Uexkuhl). In brain-endowed living organisms, such distribution involved a perception. How do the Whale and the Jaguar perceive their "outer world", their Umwelt?

(c) Can it be possible for us, endowed with our own anatomies and brains, to share in other anatomies and brains? To what extent do we communicate with an arboreal monkey living with its head down? The German painter Bazelitz has shown paintings upside down, which offers us, erect primates, and inverted display. Yet, the arboreal monkey for which the head-down position is natural is not inverted but inverts the viewer, relativizing his or her erect position as a system of reference. The Bestiaire thus opens polytopic logics (Bourne, Lavendhomme) for viewers previously made aware by the Chemin des écritures that perceptions are partly n-dimensional.

 (d) On a more anthropogenic plane, what are the "outer worlds" (Umwelt) that are not constructed by the angularization, orthogonalization, transversalization, referentiality, and holosomy of Homo, who lives in a Welt and just a Welt, i.e. an Umwelt that is both closed and open by a horizon. Each painting in the Bestaire proclaims the contrast between the animal conscience and the human conscience, as in Rilke's eighth Duineser Elegien:

"If there was consciousness like ours
in the sure creature, that moves towards us
on a different track – it would drag us
round in its wake. But its own being
is boundless, unfathomable, and without a view
of its condition, pure as its outward gaze.
And where we see future it sees everything,
and itself in everything, and is healed for ever."
(Translation: A. S. Kline)

(e) Micheline Lo's Bestiaire is amazement and admiration before the existential singularities of animal species, a collection of objective interfaces that activate our subjective interfaces, produces a brain effervescence that is admittedly less general than with the Chemin des écritures, though it is perhaps more intimately mutational.

1999: Mousiqa

Arabic music, among the array of traditional music, clearly heralds today's music of the living formations. Its sequence is ostensible, because of its restricted scale. It is highly resequentiating, by impatience or by encounter, to the point of reaching paraorgasmic stridencies, giving rise not only to variations but transformations (Oum Kalsoum has up to thirty in one single evening). Here, too, analogies are generated by rerouting of digitalities (for which nomadic people have a propensity, according to some). The musical phrase is not first and foremost a general intent that would generate parts, but rather random events, hazards sensu stricto, where aims, should they emerge, are transitory. Arabic music is noted with dots, lines, and ties, a boon for the painter of the Chemin des écritures.

This time, the painter no longer sought those immanences but rather the instants when, while structures and textures are still palpable, the ultrastructures of stridency turn immanence into transcendence, when saltana gives rise to tarab, sheer intensity of a cry in which everything that has been placed is at once undone. On the pictorial plane, only the green-yellow, that optical center which is prerequisite to the rhetoric of color complementarities, can sustain such ecstasies. It is the color of Islam, religion of non-mediatizable transcendence, which was ostracized by Mondrian. Should green-yellow, then, have covered practically the whole canvas? What we learn from Arabic music is that transcendence can be aimed at only by an inversion of immanences. Here, with respect to color, pink and blue; and with respect to trait, a few ties.

This suite of paintings is a good opportunity to mention Micheline Lo's relationship to music. She played classical music on sight, but rarely except for Scarlatti. She never listened to music while she painted, but she almost always had some sequential music background when she read, as the Chansons à penser africaines, or Lightning's country music. She liked listening to music in loop, and her piano improvisations were comparable to the neuronal experimentation of Flexte.

1999-2000: Les Caméléons

Mousiqa was the beyond of all painting, while the Caméléons are the natural object of this type of painting. They are transformation, (re)sequenciation, ultrastructures, encounter between an external and an internal environment, interfaces of inside/outside as focal points of individuation, confusion between perceived and perceiving, perception not from the outside, as a mere cutout, but from the inside. The viewer-contemplator intending to remain before the painting, is first and foremost inside, polytopical. Those familiar with the work often said that if one had to capsulize this type of painting in an image, a chameleon would exactly do the work.

2000: Les Mains

Certain cosmologists, as Lachière-Ray, would fain repeat that they should be able to explain themselves using their hands only. This is all the more true for cosmogonists, which may explain the number of hand prints left by Homo on painted rock walls more than thirty thousand years ago.

The hands best sum up the technical and artistic gesture of Homo, the angularizing, orthogonalizing, transversalizing, and exchanging primate. They are perceiving and perceived, subjects and objects, sources of analogies as modeling, smoothing, planishing palms; and of digitality as fingers, the first abacus. Panoply of index finger (Zeigefinger) that designates, by contact or from a distance, equally well the edible prey (here, now) and the contemplatable power and justice (elsewhere, some day).

Micheline Lo's Les Mains were those that painted-and-wrote the Chemins des écritures, more abstract than concrete, and more distancing than bringing closer. For them, digitality foments analogy, more often than the reverse, and the impatience of the organ creates the purpose more than it obeys it.

2001: Migrations

It has been shown that, in this approach, the frame is a levee against reflux, from which (re)sequenciations flow back onto the whole surface in superimpositions. Yet, with this in mind, something is missing from those living formations, that is, the movement that causes one generation to give way to the one that follows, just as it ousted the one that came before, so that the living is never more than a relay in sequences of one-and-nevermore.

The painter therefore was bound to use the frame, if only in a few of her paintings, as a relay to show the beyond as much as the within, something the frame could not of itself indicate and that supposes that the framed events should present themselves as Migrations. We would still have living formations, but characterized by an availability to deletion, more prone to disappearance than to fecundity, and in a pictorial option highly suggestive to designatory Mains, always elsewhere than where they are.

It is quite possible that this was prompted by circumstances of the painter's life. In October 2000, her breast cancer that in the past seven years had responded to moderate therapy now required a monthly, and then weekly dose of chemotherapy, and the end of life was no longer a vague and common point in time. Any individuation thus became a temporary loop among much vaster migrations.

2001: Quetzalcoatl

The Mexican god Quetzalcoatl was eminently suited to that state of mind. Both the god's name and image attest to the meeting of the Serpent and the Eagle in an embrace, but also devouring each other, at least potentially, while the Owl looks on, with the unflinching eyes of Destiny. Quetzalcoatl, at the same time benevolent and cruel, is the total sum of the divine, the thick blood — the "quik" of Popol Vuh — that circulates between the superior, the terrestrial, and the underworld, merging the viewer and the viewed in one same orgasmic ecstasy of Maya and Aztec sacrifices.

Quetzalcoatl was all the more relevant to this painting as the god's figure, being Amerindian, is both written and writing. It is a sequence of squares, rhombuses, rings, and feathers, punctuated by pulsing tropical colors, causing both forms and substance to pulse, so that "it advances and retreats at the same time." More than with any of the Western gods, it wavers between the analogic and the digital, and musters (re)sequenciation as a general polymerization of rocks, animals, men, and gods. There, any purpose, as it emerges, has already disappeared in the jungle of the means, each head — animal or human — still embedded in the ancestor's head, even then embedding that of the child, reminiscent of the Olmec. Or again, confusing the front of its face-to-face with that of the other's face-to-face, since Chavín de Huantar. Where skin has the quality of bone, and bone that of skin. As in the Bestiaire.

2001: Les esprits du vin

The moment of the final departure was drawing near, and wine — with its spirits — lends itself to a farewell. Its hundreds of chemical compounds, its ostensible maturation, its palpable merging of the four elements of Empedocles: Earth (terroir), Water (liquid), Air (oxygen), and Fire (alcohol) make wine a popular cosmogony, mingling the physical, the technical and the symbolic, offering a daily opportunity to activate, soak, and glimpse the cerebral landscape. Since the time of Flexte, the painter of the Chemins des écritures had fused the image of the liquor and the discourse held on its subject.

This was an ultimate manner of causing the analogic and the digital to trigger each other, and above all of weaving together conscience and un-conscience. To someone who remarked that while the project was exciting but impossible, she replied, "I paint only that which is impossible".

She painted twelve Esprits du vin (six "reds", and six "whites") during the grape harvest near the Route des Vins which in Provence goes from her own town, Nyons, to the city of Orange. Among the innumerable wine qualifiers, those she chose almost suggest some self-portrait. The reds conjured up aromas of fruit, coffee, black currant, cocoa, hyacinth, clove, cinnamon, prune, iris, fig, banana, violet, plum, peach, resin, or linden blossom; they were tender, full-bodied, robust, spicy, heady, deep, complete, seductive, elegant, thick. The whites had flavors suggestive of flowers, vanilla, honey, spices, curry, almond, green apple; they were aromatic, exotic, intimate, crisp, cool, tart, vigorous, sprightly, slightly astringent, tempered, enhanced, mellow, charming, scented, youthful.

Micheline Lo always stressed the role of an artist's nervous system in his or her production, so that we cannot write about her without alluding to her complexion. A born left-handed, she was forcibly taught to use her write hand, which — it is now believed — sometimes favors intense perceptions of dimensions that remain recondite in space and even perhaps in space-time, as witnessed by DaVinci and many sculptors.

Our perceptive systems are twofold: in one, the objects in our environment are apprehended on a median definition, with tempered field effects, affording a smooth perception, as of ensembles; in the other, perceptions are fixative-fixed, which means the objects are perceived with such a projection of their field effects that they function both as viewed and viewing. A perfect example is the main character in Robbe-Grillet's Voyeur: the sight of the girl on the balustrade and of a rope folded on the ground, means that the girl has already been strangled. Micheline Lo curiously combined those two regimes of perception, as she almost always lived in the perception that was the most reasonable and balanced, the most objectivating and veridical, the most direct. Yet, at times, this was broken by exogenous, fulgurous, or disruptive perceptions. In both cases, in a straight manner and in full view.

Her painting probably required this mixture of objectivity and violence, both almost absolute, and the crossing of the two enabled her, in her day to day life, to dispense with any deliberation, causing her decisions to be immediately pertinent. And when she walked into her workroom, it was with a combination of relaxation and concentration, the possible and the impossible.

This fails to explain the immensity of the "figures" of Salammbô, of the bandits of Jean Genet, of the conquistadors of the Terra Nostra, of the men born Cordillera and Amazonia in Cien años de soledad. Nor the generative densities of the Chemins des Ecritures and the Bestaire. Even less L'Astronome, which was placed at the head of her coffin before her cremation. But this perhaps will help understand that nothing should be taken for granted, even here.

Some have marveled at the clearness, even the ostentation, of Micheline Lo's signature and dating on her paintings. This is because the artist's brain is of the same nature as the painting: he or she paints states-moments of the Universe, once and nevermore. Each of the pictorial action is therefore also a state-moment of the Universe, once and nevermore. It is radically dated and situated. For humility, and for admiration.

Henri Van Lier
Translated by Peter John