On Laubies' work

The "naturalist pre-figurative" abstract impressions of René Laubiès, the spiritual tête of "nuagisme," that vague appellation engendered by his critics that ignored too much his exteriorized plasmas, wind-blown ash over arid terrains. Anonymous transparencies of loosened stain from the torrid earthen wall. They are the light of quiescent colour (his tableaux): shade without tension, toneless shade; texturous shade of warmth rubbed patchy under fine-scratch brushings and sun-blanched mauve.

"Just chase away the thoughts from your mind," he said at Puri, with his subtle modulations of gait and laugh. He is the culminating issuance of Modernist trends since the ancient Chinese Tang.

These odorous strains of fecund terseness disarming in their paucity, stoic, sheer; and with each new tablet out-flanking its precursor: pure abstraction retaining no interpreters, inwardly comporting yet devoid of gnostic footnotes, ramps unsolicitous precipitating ends...

Wintering in Palakunnu village he is stunning, amazing, salubrious, calm and alert. Cessative tinctures of diluted jissom, dried and peeling in the morning-fresh sun... 

Then Spring exhibitions in Milan and Paris. Then back through the Greater and Lesser Sundas. Through the hunger, thirst, tabulation and loss. Through the patterned stains of sweat-laced breezes. Hiking off alone when the turpentine is finished, transparently alive in the pan-Islamic silence...

"On Laubies's Work," 1990. Early draft originally published in René Laubiès, Octobre-Novembre 1990. Gallery Michel Broomhead. Paris; Achevé d'imprimer sur les presses de Mira Impression à Libourne, Conception: Canovas Belchi.

See Nuagisme.