ABSTRACT
In 1985 I saw the original of Kurosawa Akira’s film Ran, which is not easily rendered into French or English. In Japanese the word ran means ‘disorder’, ‘turmoil’, ‘destruction’, as well as ‘chaos’ or ‘war’. A few days later I went to admire paintings by Roberto Matta in Paris. One of the works by this great surrealist is called ‘Les puissances du desordre’, or ‘The Powers of Confusion’, and depicts an irrational force driving things towards confusion, towards decomposition, destruction. ‘Matta’s space is the space in constant movement, bifurcation, decomposition. The ejecting, plural space. The space with traits of time: it flows away and gets incessantly divided into subtle particles’ – wrote the Mexican poet Octavio Paz in ‘Vestibule’, the text accompanying the exhibition.
