But How to Silence My Commentaries? (1999)

The question is a harrowing one because, it’s true, I talk too much. It seems to me, for what it’s worth, that the country that appreciates me the most is Germany, whose language I do not speak. The situation is hardly dire, however, and this book ought to demonstrate how, over forty years, my commentaries have progressively lost their seriousness, and are now beginning to lose their sense, if not their very existence. 

At first I thought to use puns, approximations, spoonerisms, and other kinds of wordplay to give more appeal, more force, to the presentation of my ideas. This soon led me to privilege those ideas that allowed me to play with the words they contained. The final step came when I became “hooked” on that most dreaded form of wordplay: the palindrome. I must at least in passing pay homage to André Thomkins and Georges Perec, who spent days and nights before I ever did creating sentences whose sole merit, whose sole justification, was that they could be read in both directions. The difficulty, which the uninitiated cannot realize, is so extreme that it is tempting to be satisfied with sentences whose “message” is at the very least “not particularly clear,” if it is present at all. 

Thus did I find, for writing, a rigorous and absurd system quite close to those I take such pleasure in applying to painting. I have even added, to the constraint inherent to palindromes, that of the choice of a word (art) that appears in each of my pseudo-sentences. With the help of my son Friquet, we selected 111 (a “palindromic” number) palindromes that speak, in both directions, of art. 

One may be assured that therein lies the entire essence of what can be written on the subject of art… in palindromes, obviously.