The Shape of a Pocket

nudging us, the flies around their eyes, the valley and the pine trees on the far crest, the smell of piss as Delphine pissed, the buzzard hovering over the field called La Plaine Fin, the water pouring into the trough, me, the mud in the tunnel of trees, the immeasurable age of the mountain, suddenly everything there was indivisible, was one. Later each part would fall to pieces at its own rate. Now they were all compacted together. As compact as an acrobat on a tightrope.
    ‘Listening not to me but to the
logos
, it is wise to agree that all things are one,’ said Heraclitus, twenty-nine thousand years after the Chauvet paintings were made.
    Only if we remember this unity and the darkness we spoke of, can we find our way into the space of those first paintings.
    Nothing is framed in them; more important, nothing meets. Because the animals run and are seen in profile (which is essentially the view of a poorly armed hunter seeking a target) they sometimes give the impression that they’re going to meet. But look more carefully: they cross without meeting.
    Their space has absolutely nothing in common with that of a stage. When experts pretend that they can see here ‘the beginnings of perspective’, they are falling into a deep, anachronistic trap. Pictorial systems of perspective are architectural and urban – depending upon the window and the door. Nomadic ‘perspective’ is about coexistence, not about distance.
    Deep in the cave, which meant deep in the earth, there was everything: wind, water, fire, faraway places, the dead, thunder, pain, paths, animals, light, the unborn … They were there in the rock to be called to. The famous imprints of life-size hands (when we look at them we say they are ours) – these hands are there, stencilled in ochre, to touch and mark the everything-present and the ultimate frontier of the space this presence inhabits.
    The drawings came, one after another, sometimes to the same spot, with years or perhaps centuries between them, and the fingers of the drawing hand belonging to a different artist.
    All the drama that in later art becomes a scene painted
on
a surface with edges is compacted here into the apparition that has come
through
the rock to be seen. The limestone opens for it, lending it a bulge here, a hollow there, a deep scratch, an overhanging lip, a receding flank.
    When an apparition came to an artist, it came almost invisibly, trailing a distant, unrecognisably vast sound, and he or she found it and traced where it nudged the surface, the facing surface, on which it would now stay visible even when it had withdrawn and gone back into the one.
    Things happened that later millennia found it hard to understand. A head came without a body. Two heads arrived, one behind the other. A single hind leg chose its body, which already had four legs. Six antlers settled in a single skull.
    It doesn’t matter what size we are when we nudge the surface: we may be gigantic or small – all that matters is how far we have come through the rock.
    The drama of these first painted creatures is neither to the side nor to the front, but always behind, in the rock. From where they came. As we did, too …

5
Penelope

    You have to see them. Words can’t get round them. And reproduction sends them back to where they came from. (Most of her works originate in photographs.) You have to be within touching distance of them.
    It has been said that Velazquez was (is) very important for her. I can believe it. One or two of the things I wan’t to say about her might also refer to him, but to few other painters I can think of. The precondition for their common stance is a certain form of anonymity, a stepping aside.
    Vija Celmins is sixty-three years old. She was born in Riga. Her parents emigrated to the US. For thirty years she lived in Venice, California. Now she is in New York.
    My bet is that when she was in the Prado, discovering Velazquez, one painting went straight to her heart – the
Tapestry Weavers.
    She both paints and draws, paints in oils, draws with graphite. The work is highly finished and shows what things look like – an electric fire, for example, a TV set, a hotplate, a pistol. These are not from photos; they are life-size, and painted like the Rokeby Venus. I don’t say this to compare genius, but to convey the kind of observation, in which tonal precision is so important, working within a patient and very tactful technique of searching.
    Her other subjects are