One is straight away struck by a paucity of words availed to expound this chanced-upon poiesis born in crevasses of cultural hybridity and nourished in the no man's lands of ascetic transmutation

Tipped into sheer prefiguration

René Laubies (French, 1924–2006)
Mykonos, 1958.
Oil on paper laid on canvas,
65 x 100 cm. (25.6 x 39.4 in.)
On learning of the passing of Rene Laubies the figurative infix died all around me. It had taken the death of my friend and teacher to tip me into sheer prefiguration. I had never been able to go there before in spite of my arriving to the crucial point of esteeming non-figuration solely. I had never been able to bring to an end the image/figure referencing impulse. So I simply quit painting and stuck to writing. Yet the drive to go total—to go without—adhered to me through years of intention-bearing écriture: a quiet metamorphosis advancing formulations of a cumulative method that revealed correlation to the blind operations of an illiterate calligraphist.

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