Picasso's approach could be likened to an archeological approach.
This approach allows the artist to locate the place where the work emerges within the temporal context closest to a degree zero, the place where the filling point for the white void of the canvas begins, and becomes the vector line of time, the place where the seminal point is conceived, the source of ensuing visual proliferations. From there on, Picasso's approach is further elaborated when he states that he proceeds with destructions, with a “sum of destructions”: this consists of a quest for what is capable of suddenly making the void spring to life. Unlike most of his colleagues, he focuses his efforts on an exploratory and analytical quest, flushing out signs of this hermetic writing, which is less in the order of the tangible than of absence: that which has hopelessly disappeared, that which has been taken away or has simply decomposed yet continues to survive, at the same time, in the hollow of a void: empty spaces, intervals or empty shapes. Picasso's analytical output, as Deleuze notes, finds its reason for existence, its pretext, in the void, in the negative. Because clearly what we have here is a pre-image. Picasso does not refrain from associating the hermeneutics of the void, the hollow, the interval, with the unfolding of his account. The white canvas is filled with calligraphic signs that serve to find, or to create anew, the meaning that had been lost. The void comprises in nuce the entire life of a work that the shattering produced by the configuration of the image had scattered across the surface of the painting.
We are in the presence of a stratified image. The space is the last testimony of a purpose, of a visual outcome and of a meaningful whole. It contains the negative of the genesis of this visual world, its origination. The void, therefore, was not complete. It is organized around a point, a sign, without dimming it, because in this case to dim it would be to “fill it in”, giving it the beginning of a meaning, or at least a direction. And for Picasso, this “beginning” of a meaning is also its end. It is about the semantics of passages, of intervals, of tempuscules[1], that determine the ways of coming within the scope of duration. As in Bergsonian duration, the image is indistinct; it has not burst, it is not burst. There is only a horizon in the distance, beyond the surface, in the depths—a visible threshold. We have yet to reach the horizon, to see the shape, to cross it; the issue is none other than to bridge the gap between perceptive realities of a “durative” image that develops both on the surface and in the depths. Bergson's philosophy of duration and intuition is what provides Picasso with the means for delving into this complex artistic digression. His art repeatedly draws from the Bergsonian source, with the work's temporality melting into clearly productive duration.
The diagram that enables us to visualize Picasso’s creative process is faithfully based on Bergson’s intuitive method. It involves “jumping” into the center after having aimed at all the points. Analyzing his own artistic approach, Picasso observes that it is like a sequence of sudden changes of subject: a series of “leaps from one summit to the next”. When he was starting to work on a piece, Picasso claimed that he felt as though he were jumping off a cliff. And what does that represent, other than the vital impulse? What is the vital impulse according to Bergson? It is an “image.” More precisely, it is an image that represents an impulse. The impulse “of a jumper bouncing off a springboard.”[2] Are these just a series of coincidences or a reformulation of Bergsonian theories in the fields of literature and art?
[1] The tempuscule corresponds to the threshold at which one may determine “the truth value of propositions in a theoretical frame of reference remains indeterminate.” Under this theory, the “moment” is no longer a point (sensu stricto) in an autonomous ensemble with limited meanings. Bertrand Westphal, Geocriticism: Real and Fictional Spaces, Palgrave Macmillan, 2011.
[2] Lydie Adolphe, La dialectique des images chez Bergson, “Bibliothèque de philosophie contemporaine” collection, Félix Alcan, Presses Universitaires de France, Paris 1951, “Première partie, Viser”, pp. 4-5.
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Summary