Resumen de « Au pied du mur de la réalité »: Leiris et la peinture
Ut pictura poiesis... Painting, with its promise of revelation, is for Leiris not so much a springboard for speculation as a listening-post through which he attempts to seize, first through the discursive process of reading and then that of writing, that overwhelming sense of presence which was, from the beginning, his criterion of a work of art. Talking about painting, be it that of Picasso, Masson, Bacon, Miré or Giacommetti is, for Leiris, simply another way of talking about writing, about what writing might have been or what it should be. In the late 1920s, the 'realist' paintings of Picasso provided Leiris with a way out of the impasse of surrealism. Equally, in the years commonly referred to as his 'tauromachy' period, Leiris' definition of an aesthetics of distortion makes frequent and obvious reference to the paintings of Masson which also gave impetusto the move towards autobiography in the post-war period. More recently, the works of Bacon raise again the question of presence which in fact has always been for Leiris a central preoccupation.
