The title of the painting is “Still Life with Apples” (1894) housed at the Getty. Like many of Cézanne’s pictures of the 1890s we have a sense of immediately entering into an space warped by distance and nearness that lavishly seals the scene. We feel that something has taken place; after all these are pictures of an event, but only concealed to us. We are given the sense of that experience, which is the fundamental thing to depict for Cézanne. Now, if Clark is correct, then it is true that Cézanne’s still life painting was meant to annihilate the objectivity of the world through a study and stubborn simplicity; although simplicity never amounts to synthesis. On the contrary, what preserves sensation over absorption remains at a distance: this is the narrowing act of simplicity as a fact of style [1]. The depiction of appearance is a problem for Cézanne precisely because painting now stood (late nineteenth century), as Kurt Badt well observed, as the last metaphysical activity in the face of Western nihilism [2]. There is nihilism, an unbridled chaos – and thus painting aspired to accomplish a different form of order, a transfiguration through sense. A higher order subtracted from representation. Thus, the outpouring of sense was everything to Cézanne; nothingless than the attunement of the relationship between depiction and nature. Thus, nearness and distance stands a problem in the picture itself: what is most apparent is what Cézanne seeks to qualify through depth and singular brittle rigidity.

As he would write to his friend Émile Bernard: “In order to make progress in realization, there is only nature, and an eye educated by contact with it….I mean that in an oregon, an apple, a ball, a head, there is a culminating point, and this point is always the closet to our eye, the edges of objects recede towards a centre placed at eye level. With only a little bit of temperament one can be a lot of painter. All you need is an artistic sensibility. And doubtless this sensibility horrifies the bourgeois” [2]. This is Cézanne’s permanent struggle (a non-subjective position, that is, anti-Romantic) struggle: the impossibility to “realize” and to complete a picture as the heart of the mysterious vortex of the execution of depiction. This clears the entrypoint to the problem of the “last metaphysical activity in the wake of nihilism” that Badt consigns to the activity of painting: pictorial art can reveal the unrealizable in every work; but it is no less true that all works fundamentally have an asymptotic inclination to the potential of realizing the idea. The achievement of that impossible nearness attest to the achievement of painting (or to its consummated failure).

The unrealizable in Cézanne’s painting, however, is not merely indexing the unfinished gesture of the brush in a scene or a series of selected objects; rather it is the condition of possibility for entering into the world through a medial common existence between things, however fragmentary within the whole. The unrealizable dimension is never a conscious attempt for a spatial unity to be fulfilled; it is alienable by a stylistic reduction at the moment in which it ceases to belong to the painter’s cognition. This is why Cézanne’s pictorial project – more so than Pisarro’s anarchic affinities and political flirtations in the late nineteenth century – has radical consequences for an opening of freedom that is grounded on the senses (and what it means to be ‘free in the senses and the passion’, in each temperament), allowing experience to decompress the formalistic representational conditions of bourgeois civility. Indeed, Cézanne’s work – and the world it depicts, the opening towards things as a whole but through separation, having in common precisely alienability – does not aspire to be legible in the social, which is the ideal space of exchange and metaphorization, recognition and reification as image. The social is the limitless spatiality in which anything can enter, as anything can stand for any other thing. Or, to put it more concisely: painting seeks to let things be things in their interchangeable nature (without the anxiety over fixing an image of Nature).

Cézanne inadvertently knows that whatever fate in the wake of nihilism awaits “painting” (soon to be utterly destroyed and displaced by the conceptual and object driven monstrosity of the modern vanguard), the effort to “realize” in painting meant holding to experience of depth as the only guarantee of an existential freedom. Surface and depth will remain on the side of the insistence of an appearance without predicates proper to theatricality. Kurt Badt poignantly captures this in Cézanne’s “old age style”: “There is no longer anything in our sensory experience of seeing which corresponds to what thus becoming visible; what is shown nis rather the visible picture of the concept of freedom. For the thing common to all these forms of the “style of old age” is two-faced: negatively it is a ligeration from isolation and resistance, possibly a liberation to the serious gentleness of freedom” [4]. And gentleness means letting things be: the serene elevation to irreducibility, upholding them only in the proclivity of its contact; never fully absorbed by surrounding and revealing its state of harmonious composition. The task of depiction in painting is the impossible task- but the task nonetheless thoroughly achievable through the hands of the painter – of coming as close as possible to what has actually been experienced. Having affirmed (not necessarily achieved) something like a fate-like divine temporality in painting is able to ground worldliness as transcendent only to let it fall immediately after. And what fate is to character, for Cézanne ‘that which is preserved unchanged’ is the supreme tonality of the pictorial task realized by the restraint of the artist [5].

But precisely to depict immobility, the forever permanent, the befallen weight of the conatus essendi (what preserves itself as such), painting has to mobilize a minimum motion for the confluence of objects, planes, and emergence of depth. The pink stripe tablecloths that appear in several of the 1890s still life paintings with fruits can be very well taken as a multum in parvo of the declension in every realization. In a sense, then, the pink strip is a signature, as if were, of the gathering of things and depth at the price of unrealizing the closure of integral depiction. It is precisely the pink stripe in which it becomes realizable in a single brushstroke that the place of the line appears otherwise, crowning the mystery of painting as the clearest manifestation of a different musical order. It is the mysteriously nature of painting, which barely introduces itself as a line substitute for a color (the color of the tablecloth as a thing) that, while remaining visible to the viewer, cannot but reveal the invisible; that is, the temperament of the artist attuned to the muteness of painting, to say with Poussin. And perhaps this is the highest moment of depiction in the search for the “integrity” of “wholeness” that, in turn, grants the instance of the unconcealment of truth. A lace plotting what has already been validated in the irrevocable thereness of the most inapparent existence: an eternal state in the world.

.

.

Notes 

1. Maurice Denis. “Cézanne II”, The Burlington Magazine for Connoisseurs, Feb, 1910, 279.

2. Kurt Badt. The Art of Cézanne (University of California Press, 1965), 181.

3. The Letters of Paul Cézanne (Getty Museum, 2013), 342. 

4. Kurt Badt. The Art of Cézanne (University of California Press, 1965), 313-314.

5. Ibid., 161.