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365 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1977
Cognition is the act of knowing: this is the simplest definition, with which I must be satisfied, for it is essential that I should be able to simplify everything in order to proceed. It was never exactly a question of knowing in the portraits I have painted.
It amuses me to think that I am pursuing an extinct art, thanks to which, because of my fallibility, people believe they can capture a somewhat pleasing image of themselves, organized in terms of certainty, of an eternity which does not only begin when the portrait is finished but was there before, forever, like something that has always existed simply because it exists now, an eternity counted back to zero.
That is how it turned out. The first picture was a complete failure and I could not give up. If S. eluded me, or I failed to capture him and he realized it, then the only solution would be a second portrait painted in his absence. I tried this. The sitter became the first portrait and the invisible one I was pursuing. I could never be satisfied with a mere likeness, nor even with the psychological probing within the grasp of any apprentice, based on precepts as banal as those which give form to the most naturalistic and superficial of portraits. The moment S. entered my studio I realized I had to know everything if I wanted to dissect that self-assurance, that impassiveness, that smug expression of being handsome and healthy, that insolence cultivated day by day so that it might strike where it hurt most.
I am back at my writing, but had broken off to place the chair on which I was sitting beside the saint. Now I am on the floor with my legs crossed like the Egyptian scribe in the Louvre. I raise my eyes and look at the saint, I lower them, look at the chair, two manmade objects, two reasons for living, and I ask myself which is the more perfect, the more apt for its purpose, the more useful. And after much debate I withhold the prize from both the saint and the chair.