“Beauty in art surpasses that of nature, for it is born and reborn of the spirit (Geist)”, says Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831) in his Aesthetics. Beauty herein, therefore, is never enslaved by mimesis but is rather confirmed as pictorial poiesis. The site of its apparition is no other than the very surface of the canvas. Therein resides the origin of a
world: that of painting.
It is the cloud as a pictorial sign the illuminating as well as the leading conceptual figure featured in one of the most
definitive texts in the Theory of Art. In Théorie du Nuage (1972), Hubert Damisch (1928-2017) investigates the figuration
of the cloud in these celestial swirls on which the Virgin, the saints and the angels are enthroned.
The cloud, which is the privileged objet of a vaporous condensation, floats between the solidity – there are ice particles
in clouds- the liquid and its gaseous appearance and apparition. There is instability, indecibility – in Jacques Derrida’s
terms in the cloud as seen herein. The cloud, in these heavens which invade and colonize the domes of the churches,
marks the frontier of a transgression, a trespass, which is indicative of the ecstatic jouissance which commands the mannerisms anticipating the Baroque in this true theatrical apotheosis, as established by Damisch, of a Correggio
(1489-1534).
These clouds appear to engulf, to swallow in tumultuous and inescapable spirals those who contemplate these reverse
vertigos. The body of the beholder seems to ascend to these painterly celestial realms.
Ink and gesture concur to make us see these landscapes of whiteness which rise from obscurity from this backdrop of
dark and menacingly foggy depths. It is a whirlwind. Spirals, swirls, contortion. We are before a scene of baroque and
romantic contours: the very form of memory as symptom. From this dark and black background there surge these gaseous condensations in the shape of masses of white tint which spread assuming the form of blurred clouds. Intense
clouds, dense clouds. Clouds drenched in pigment. Painted clouds. Clouds whose beauty stems precisely from their
fabricated, fabulated pictorialness. Clouds whose cloudiness emerge from Tallova’s brush strokes.