Marcel Jean and Henri Pastoureau both belong to the surrealist old guard.
     Marcel Jean is not a painter-artist-- as people once put it.  He is more
of a discoverer.  He finds new processes for faithfully "super-expressing"
nature in the areas of mobility, coincidence, exasperation.  Thus this con-
vinced materialist infidel has to convince himself that his hands perform
miracles-- miracles not much less miraculous than Veronica's veil.  Marcel
Jean's brush is water.  Marcel Jean's palette is water.  He applies the name
"flottages" (floatings) to the plates that have caught, with his help, all
the contents of colored water-- latent mobility, coincidence, and exasperation.
He caresses Thales' element with his hands, his feet, his cheeks, his lips.
He obtains stains of dew and dust and blood and snow and soot and smoke from
it.  He kneads and batters it, and makes it laugh.  He does such a good job
of making it laugh that he himself laughs until tears come to his eyes.  This
brings us close to zen and dada.  I can't explain zen any more than I can ex-
plain dada.  Yet I was a dadaist for a number of years.  One thing is certain.
We are in a realm at the extreme opposite of the domain of reason.  We are
sheltered from the mechanical madness and the deafening noise, from the kings
of sport who jump even farther than the frogs, from all progress toward noth-
ingness.
     Today's art takes nature as seriously as one takes life or death.  Art
no longer represents nature.  It has become nature itself.  The pretty games
of art are done.
     On the plates that I'm talking about there are words and phrases by Henri
Pastoureau scattered throughout the nature-art of Marcel Jean.  They are written
in old-fashioned script-- I mean the letters that we once learned to calligraph
in school.  The drift of these writings recalls what the wind tells us, recalls
the answers we receive from an echo.  The inexplicable replies to the demand for
an explanation, nature itself answers the interrogation about nature.  In Henri
Pastoureau's volume of poems Le Corps trop grand pour cercueil (A Body Too Big
for a Coffin) there is a verse that I think perfectly answers any question
that might come up when we try to explain the universe.  We are never doing any-
thing but trying "to drown the fishes."

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