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The four levels in non-esthetics.

(Flash: Non-euclidian painting follows four rules. The first requires that each painting of the polyptych be able to stand-alone. The second requirement is that all the paintings in the polyptych conform to a certain continuity. The third entails deformation in the space of each painting individually as well as the work as a whole. The fourth gives the whole ensemble an allegorical dimension.)

(Description) We have to re-examine the descriptive codification of art, the inner codification of art itself, because it includes an interface with which it communicates to every work of its constitutive museum. We have to do this without alluding to non-personal units, called “haecceties” according to Deleuze. The dialogue between these works of art gives birth to the first non-esthetics and the first non-verbal codification. In fact, what this tells us is that all of art belongs to a real museum which is renewed in every work of art, and which belongs to every author and to the civilization as a whole. Malraux was the first to have stated this clearly. When we look at the works of Braque and Picasso, we can actually walk out of one work of art to enter a variation of the same. Often this variation is imperceptible. The work “Homage to Bach” and the series of characters with instruments from the cubist period are symptomatic of this. There are works of art that defy traditional esthetics, even if tradition would like to re-inscribe them in the codification of traditional geniality and uniqueness.

Picasso copies Braque in the same way as he will later copy all the works of his own imaginary museum, translating them into his individual style. In spite of this, the analytic and synthetic cubism of this period in themselves constitute a symptom of an esthetics of the frontiers between the habitual creative dimension (the esthetics of a unique work of art) and the need for its descriptive dimension (the esthetics of the philosophical discourse about the work itself). This period is a symptom of the fact that in every work there is an invisible proximity with another work that is within, however imperceptibly, because each work is a silent commentary of another.

We call this a non-esthetic process because it separates itself from the complex of the line explained in Plato’s work. In Plato’s work, as in the traditional philosophy, there must be a cut between dianoia, orknowledge in the higher sense of the word, and eikasia or illusion. Nevertheless, we feel there can be dialectic between the two. That is why artwork can be an interface between rational knowledge and the world of illusion. Now, there will be no separation between the work and its mirror image, that is, another work included in it or emulated by it, or the commentary it provokes. A painting by Braque can be an answer to another one by Picasso, and it can explain the other without words, without a system. This non-esthetic we have just described, maintains a minimum amount of unity in the first work of art itself but it can give it a descriptive dimension. The second work reveals what is in the first work. Outside the sphere of external commentaries, controlled by philosophy, this can be the first frontier of a non-esthetic dimension.

The second level goes beyond the fact that the revelation of the overlapping of the works of art can reveal their essence. It can proceed to extrapolations. Flash Animation provides an illustration of this. It confronts works of the same period, but this time it breaks them into parts, breaching their integrity. Actually, we can show this fact through numerical photomontage, for example by taking the geometrical landscape by Le Havre, including the houses of L’Estaque, and combine it with the painting of “Ambroise Volard” by Picasso, which is a portrait of the same musical essence as the works of Braque. The photomontage’s didactical impact will be through the images that compose it, without words. The effect will be that Picasso’s “Volard” will harmonize with the fragmented musical effect of Braque’s landscape. It all reveals a codification of the world through the geometrical fragmentation of its unity. Suddenly, all of these works appear in their musical dimension, making this period an ongoing homage to music. Perhaps cubism is nothing more than an algorithm, a pictorial algorithm that attempts to simulate music in the first place. This second dimension of non-esthetics goes beyond the integrity of the work of art. It is a taboo that is only permitted to the artists. The last Picasso showed us the way to translate one work of art into another one, without making use of words. For an artist there are no taboos. That is why Dali translated the Angelus by Millet so many times, so that the non-esthetics of level two, works like art itself. That is why it changes the framework of artistic property. Nevertheless, we retain the law that the image has an explicative virtue through the implicit discourse included in it.

Level three presents even more daring extrapolations