As the landscape is closed progressively by advertising images, the concerns of people encounter this unrealistic propaganda. According to appearances, the art which before praised the divinity, then enchanted the man, would have come from there to praise the disincarnated objects massively put on sale. Nonglad to occupy the spirit of the contemporaries, commercial publicity would thus claim to be used as mass culture while the culture of elite is isolated from the public. But great art, if it is dedication, is also contradiction. It will not let distract the public by a communication which aims only to the promotion of one characteristic to the dimension of public quality. Noodle dishes for publivorous during the food shortage of the damned.

In publicity, a heap of inventions of art and science are used in order to make more effective the handling of the population under influence. Major styles, from painting and to the cinema, are recovered to dress naked wares (goods) like the poor wretch which produced them. But the advertisements are neither beautiful nor veracious, because the context necessary to these qualities been missing there. The work of art keeps something of alive which it represents and that resounds in the heart of a public living itself in truth and beauty. Conversely it will be understood that the success of the mediocrity is correlative with the mediocrity of the public life itself. Thus allow me, my lord, to be on the different edge !

The laboratories of dialectic are equipment as much as corporatename. Publicity everywhere presents is the determined situation from which one considers a poetic higher bid. Not to deny or remove publicity simply, but to push the play on an unknown level by emancipating the publicity of the strict framework (field) of the trade of mass for which it works. This prospect is traced in the long run and can be carried out only with the assistance organized artists and of a vast public. For the moment, we can already express this possibility during preparatory experiments by means of concrete works going in this direction. Here thus invented the end of the problem of the blank page and the beginning of that of the full page.

Currently, one can distinguish two groups from works : firstly, surimage painting, publicist painting on advertising background, dialectic bottom pictorial of advertising bills ; secondly, publicist printing on advertising background, graphic dialectic of elements extracted out the advertising context and laid down on paper of this origin. Publicist painting on advertising background is a style of painting which consists in painting on an advertising image starting from its initial significance. It acts by attenuating or by gumming the parts of the image which make the advertisement character of it. When the potentialities of the image are thus regenerated, one seeks the lines and the colors which can find a plausible direction to him which satisfies artistic and philosophical criteria. This dialectic method of artistic production expresses in fact the productive process most general : by means of existing objects, work produces a new object, as in nature where the parents make new individuals having their own characteristics.

Although publicity wants to claim with nothing other that to praise a product resulting from the production, the show of the things to be sold really moves on the ground of the culture to be useful themselves of its springs and not to enrich it by humanity. All the concrete aspects at the origin of the goods are masked by the abstract result which goes all alone to the market... all that there is the human one is subordinate there. A contrario, publicist painting tries to restore human dimension. In dialectic art, the result manufactured is once again the proof that work is the source of all new richness.
Vital blow of brush on panegyric !

The painting, the art and the public cannot remain neutral in front of the development of the pseudo-culture which resells genius without paying it. The modern farming techniques are a characteristic of the social reports/ratios where the form goods prevails. In my opinion, art is a necessary activity which has still an immense work to achieve instead of continuing with to quibble endless its dead. It is now the moment of the end of a romantic art where introspection arrived at the empty and sterile bottom of the alone individual king (king, but of what ?). All the history of art testifies to the contradictions lived in the society and the intermediate solutions which preserve us from barbarism and barbarity. The great art of the epoch acts in the culture according to its extremes means. In my opinion, there remains directed in the obvious and secret direction of the dialectic one. It is time that art and philosophy publicly display the movement which transforms the existing conditions.

Michel Wauthoz © 1998.