A presentpainting. A brief incursion in Roland Barthes’ drawings.

Abstract

Indian ink, gouache, watercolour: Barthes’ fluid trace is an attempt to capture the vanishng instant, the floating inscription signs of every Sunday morning in which he used to produce his ink blots, as he says himself.It certainly is an instant of significance for him who traces and paints, but at the same time it is a gift : Barthes inscribes his body in a fragile material – usually a very thin sheet of paper as those letterheads from the École des Hautes Études – not in order to afirm himself as an artist, but for the simple pleasure of dedicating this amateur gesture to his friends, presenting them with his production. The pictorial gesture in Barthes happens, therefore, as a sign of anacoluthia, i.e.  the rare space in which our ideas penetrate each other with afect, in which friends, by walking by our side and by sharing our path, allow us to think, write, speak. In this paper I analyse the pictorial gesture in Roland Barthes not only as producing gesture, regarding the signs that delightedly vacilate between letter and image, but essencially as an offering one.