Louis Marin - Opacity and Transparence in Pictorial Representation

Louis Marin

Opacity and transparence in pictorial representation

Excerpts

[referring to Paul Klee's The R Villa]

The capital red letter R inscribed on a landscape-representation seems to annihilate the illusory depth of the picture, especially the depth created by the road or the river. It makes the painting a simple "show". It is written on the transparent plane of representation and through that letter the whole painting seems to become a set of signs, of pictograms, of ideograms; the whole painting becomes writing. [...]

The plane is no longer transparent; it is opacified at least in the place of the letter. At the same time, there is a reverse tension: the painting by its own representational power seems to convert the letter into a figure [...]

The letter, the written sign is an operator of opacity within a mimetic representation. [...]

Reversely, in the same picture by Klee, there is a kind of attraction of the letter by the representation to convert it into a mimetic figure [...] becomes mimetically transparent, representing a figure which is walking. [...]

Two complementary notions of opacity and transparence of sign and representation whose philosophical characteristics were construed very clearly and powerfully by the 17th century theorists, logicians, grammarians and moralists [...]

The functioning of signs is paradoxical. Let us take the example of reading: when I read, I am not aware of the letters, the graphemes; I am just aware of the idea, the signs of which are the letters shaped into words. Nevertheless, I cannot reach these ideas except through those intermediary signs. Reversely, if I pay attention to the letters themselves, very quickly I could not grasp what they represent. The functioning sign is at the same time present and absent, transparent and opaque.[...]