ABSTRACT
This chapter shows the risk, the anguish, of the artist whose most private practices, made available to the public. The artist is always engaged by the question of how to draw this line. The artist brings to bear the violence of this fragment of exhilarated despair which has coursed through his existence, to be embodied—impersonated—in each work which finds itself worthy of the designation “art”. The work of art is exactly this embodiment of jouissance, the embodiment of exhilarated despair. The painting seeps with a surplus, an excess which is funded from the artist's exhilarated despair. It is in this way that the painter breaks with the cliches of his own work, the way in which he does violence to the clichés and representations which inhabit the canvas as he approaches it.
