The Meeting

It is difficult, perhaps impossible, for an aspiring philosopher caught in the adventure of concepts and words, to open up to a pictorial universe, as if I had never learned to see. Each person is caught in their own adventure, in their learnings, and this demands so much energy and concentration that one hesitates to pause, to yield to the call of the image when its legibility and visibility become muddled, especially in abstract art. But to experience the poverty, the failure of one’s gaze to this extent, casts doubt on the possibilities of a thought blind to a whole part of life.

My meeting with Jano Xhenseval is recent, but I have learned so much since, received so much, that it is from these gifts that I would like to speak. The gifts of Jano Xhenseval, the gifts she has received herself and those she transmits to us. Jano Xhenseval paints as every painter should surely paint, to undeniably attest to her existence and the beauty of existence, the beauty that Simone Weil says might be the only way. In Jano Xhenseval’s paintings, every stroke is lived, experienced, and takes the gaze to its own mystery before it can even understand what it is. The mystery appears in the evidence of the light and forces the gaze, whether indifferent or avid, to consume images, to live in this disconcerting proximity with the most distant, the Unattainable. From there certainly comes the aura of Jano Xhenseval’s work and my own philosophical questioning about the meaning of the aura, at the crossroads of an artistic and religious journey.

The memory of our first meeting is tied to the magic of the Osbert house (2). As soon as you step over the threshold of this house, you are struck by how everything here seems miraculous. The small garden in the heart of the 15th arrondissement of Paris is a place of quietude, removed from the noise and metallic colors of the city. The birds have found refuge here and have become the privileged guests of our friend, the familiar of her solitude. Finally, the painting fills all the space and gives it the unique value of a poetic dream. Jano Xhenseval paints everything, the walls, the crates found on the street, the parasols, the clothes… by whim, also by necessity, to breathe, to not be crushed by the inauthenticity of the world, by indifference and misunderstanding that prevent life, the humiliations that trample intimacy. That she managed to survive all these years when she only painted without entering the game of galleries, institutional exhibitions, this too is a miracle. There is such greatness, such determination in her desire to see her painting through to the end, that those who cross her path must necessarily be impressed and spontaneously help her.

The large workshop with zenithal light, haunted by the splendid bubbling of painting at the turn of the century, lives on, despite precarious material conditions, thanks to Jano Xhenseval, who continued to carry this art to new heights. The certainty of an imminent eviction (3) made our last meeting even more moving, as if the essence of her painting had been played out in this place. That day, I felt her alone, destitute, sailing on a sea of uncertainty, and wonderfully, terribly free because she was subject to her destiny to paint, without grandiosity and without bitterness. Jano Xhenseval belongs more to painting than her painting belongs to the Osbert workshop. She paints everything, but it is on the canvas that the pictorial event occurs, the great leap into the unknown, an essential dramaturgy. However, Jano Xhenseval’s pictorial dramaturgy is nothing theatrical since the artist is alone in it and finds in herself, in the secrecy of her inner life, the successive trials she must face, as so many gropings to emerge from her night.

Sources of Childhood

Many of us had to find in the house Osbert a place to be reborn, a baptismal place to recharge, to return to the sources of childhood, to rediscover our child’s face, and often set off again unarmed but closer to the truth. Jano Xhenseval is a true being. I have never seen her play a role. She is defenseless but uncompromising with the posers that we all are at some point. She then knows how to wound deeply, with this «wound that heals» spoken of by Gregory of Nyssa, this wound of hope that allows the true birth of oneself. She, who is childless, is constantly in childhood, in this interrupted proximity to the origins, where most of us risk only brief returns. This movement, I believe, is unique to her. I have a deeply moved memory of a childhood drawing, «I was then six or seven years old,» she tells me, the very simple sketch of a little girl, thoughtful and stubborn in her path, the uncompromising part of childhood. Jano Xhenseval is attentive to children, she knows how to immediately establish complicity with them, and often reproaches our world of adults, beautiful talkers preoccupied with themselves, for not speaking enough to children. In the garden path, she has drawn a hopscotch with chalk, a childhood game, a serious game when it plays with the precariousness of our human condition, with the unknown of death and the vertigo of the step beyond.

To my knowledge, the only faces Jano Xhenseval has painted are the faces of childhood, sexless faces, angelic faces. The entire series of portraits in watercolor-charcoal captures the ineffable grace of childhood, which the adult too rarely will retain and internalize. The brilliance of the face of childhood lies in this first state of transparency to grace, in this defenseless openness to others and to time, which outwits the gaze of possession and enjoyment to provoke another gaze, born from the powerlessness of love. To give man the possibility of childhood is to give him the possibility of the face, a face freed from the mask, from the narcissistic and protective composition of the role. Jano Xhenseval’s first gift is this gift of childhood, of the «Spirit of Childhood (4)», a gift that comes from further than the power of man, from a before and an after. This return to the origins, this restoration of the face of childhood, awakens the sense of the Sacred and becomes a mystical experience of the revelation of the origins, the vision of the divine face that transfuses its peace, its infinite radiance.

The series of portraits by Jano Xhenseval goes from the face of childhood in waiting, full of a promise not yet disappointed, to the broken image of wounded, humiliated childhood. Impossible childhood is the impossibility of the face. Some drawings where the face is undone have the sonic intensity of a scream, a figure of the dissonance projected under the effect of a violence that surpasses all forms of representation. Some abstract canvases where the face is invisible have a nature that screams. The scream is a voice that comes from childhood, from the wounds of childhood. It is also a protest against the monstrous abstraction that man becomes without a face, the exiled body and «the whispered word (5)». It expresses the need to recover through the only forces of his breath, the integrity, the authenticity of the movement of an existence whose meaning man has lost. «All the magic of existing,» writes Antonin Artaud in Le Théâtre de Séraphin, «will have passed into a single chest when the times have closed. And that will be very close to a great scream, a source of human voice, like a warrior who will no longer have an army. (6)» In the pictorial dramaturgy of Jano Xhenseval, the scream is not a dispersion of the human voice but a concentration of all the unspoken life forces that besiege the artist in order not to be overwhelmed by them, condemned to the silence of madness, to the absence of a face.

The painter and the bird

But he, dressed in little gray or undressing it, to better tell us one day about the detachment of color – in all this gray or green moonlight and happy seed, in all this pearly pink or green clarity which is also that of the dream, being that of the poles and pearls under the sea – he navigated before the dream, and his answer is: “Pass over!...”

« Of all the animals that have constantly inhabited man as a living ark, the bird, with its long cries, through its encouragement to fly, was the only one to endow man with a new audacity. (7) »

It was on a painting by Jano Xhenseval exhibited in a classroom of the Centre Sèvres that I perceived the deep affinity between the painter and the bird: both are required by the infinite. The bird has donned the color of dawn, « this pearly pink clarity » mentioned by the poet, which is also that of the painter's dream, its wings spread out with gratitude to take flight. Isn't the bird's sky the painter's canvas, and its flight that of creation, a vertical flash, liberation from earthly fate? In many of Jano Xhenseval's paintings, we find this ascensional theme of flight, of detachment from the laws of gravity, this same craving for being. The bird and the painter both frequent high altitudes but remain between sky and earth, only taking flight to better embrace the curves of the earth, never breaking « the invisible thread » that connects them to the original earthly environment. In the series of drawings of trees, Jano Xhenseval constantly brings together the sky and the earth, giving all its dramatic tension to this double anchorage (8) in both the terrestrial and celestial realms. This brings to mind Vincent Van Gogh's vision: « These trees were magnificent, I would almost say there was a drama in every figure, I mean in every tree. (9) »

« Pass over!... », writes the poet. Isn't Jano Xhenseval's existence an entire life by intrusion, facing successive trials, crossing inner distances, pushing the limits of representation, always going beyond? She enjoys referring to Balzac's The Unknown Masterpiece, to the transgressive boldness of the painter Frenhofer, to this mad desire for a life truer than nature, this desire for « the incarnate (10) » which is both the demand and the limit of painting. More than any other, perhaps, abstract art breaks free from worldly appearances to reveal the appearance of the mystery of life. The painter does not aim for outward resemblance but the revelation of a mystery that manifests without exhausting itself: the violet shadows cast on the earth, the green reflections of the winding seas, the magnetism of light in the branches, a spiritual space of tension where the light within man meets the light in things. The pictorial image is alive, its expressiveness constantly changing with the lighting, and this perpetual metamorphosis gives it an elusive quality. Thus, violet, which seems to be the springboard for Jano Xhenseval's pictorial dramaturgy, changes tone, differs in intensity, in sonority depending on the surrounding colors, and works on expressiveness, on the visual harmony of the canvas: sometimes framed in gold or in a whiteness torn from the grayness, sometimes darkened by darkness, just a touch between joy and pain, of great musical sobriety, at the edge of silence.

« The opposition between the figurative and the non-figurative is futile, Jano Xhenseval keeps repeating, there is only one art, the one that transfigures. » The painter is searching for a rhythm that erases the metaphysical oppositions of space and time, of the concrete and the abstract, of the outside and the inside, on which the classical conception of representation rests. The chromatic rhythm makes the matter emerge from its inertia, infusing it with a shimmering vitality: a movement invades all forms, the sky of a golden whiteness blends with the sea foam, with the folds of brown rocks in a fluctuation where matter is diluted, melted, re-mixed. Color is this alchemical crucible, this active center in which this transmutation is realized that does not leave the earth for the heavenly clouds, a true work of incorporation and ascension of a new materiality, the transfigured flesh.

The Burning Bush

The painter's gaze does not simply see the light of the world; it opens to the donation of light, to the radiance of an origin light beyond the light of the world, beyond the opposition of day and night. In the paintings of Jano Xhenseval, this origin light appears, brought to its incandescence in the painting of the Burning Bush. The gaze is no longer in front of the canvas but is caught within it. Immersed in this « body of light », the viewer ceases to see visually and loses the power of speech, dying to all narcissism and chatter – the gaze and the speech will return to him only heavier with emotions and silence. This is where the intoxication of a transport to a spiritual place begins, no longer of this world, a solar sphere where he believes to inwardly see the Angel of the Burning Bush. A moment of grace and eternity. The original light of a host’s whiteness liberates the gaze from opacity, from the limits of matter, and lets one see in its transparency the face of the Ineffable. Like the first icons, the color gold becomes active light and fills the space with a luminous and spiritual saturation, manifesting the radiance of divine grace, the fire of divine love.

The Burning Bush is the moment of the face-to-face encounter of Moses and God, the revelation of true life through the divine name: « God said to Moses, “I am who I am.” And he said, “This is what you are to say to the Israelites: I AM has sent me to you (11)”. » Through the Burning Bush, God manifests Himself to man in the distance, by withdrawal, not in another world, but in the elusive fire. The appearance of divine light is a dazzling flash, unbearable to the human eye. Moses veils his face because he fears burning his sight. The dazzling, the darkening of worldly vision is the first step to access the mystery of divine presence. The gaze must go beyond the visible world and its visual power to see from within the mystery that faces it. The first dazzling brilliance of divine light then illuminates the human gaze, in the sense that it is for man a power of revelation, the revelation of true life.

In this conversion of the gaze, Jano Xhenseval's artistic journey is a spiritual quest. Jano Xhenseval's abstract art is not subjective or phantasmatic, but a revelation of the true, hidden, and invisible life. « The gaze on the painting, she writes, can pass quickly like a caress, or linger and get lost, never returning unscathed; it will have some “tale” to tell, some legends to carry to others, some worries to transmit. It will have to destroy what it thought it saw because it knew how to name it, in order to enter into the hidden, the invisible, and somehow lead us into a new quest. » The distance from the world of appearances is necessary for the truth of the world to be found through inner paths. Is not the very aura of the world, this ascent of the Spirit in the world, that which appears at the crossroads of artistic and spiritual quest? To the question: « What is the aura? », W. Benjamin answers: « the unique appearance of a distant thing, as close as it may be. (12) » Benjamin thus highlights this double power inherent in the aura, of immediate reach and mystery. The aura is a presence that touches and remains inaccessible. The mystery is given in full light and does not dissipate. The value of aura does not come from the impossible union of two ontologically incommensurable worlds, but from this paradoxical relationship of distance in proximity, which gives the relation of the visible to the invisible, of the finite to the infinite, its tragic and inexhaustible movement.

The aura is an experience of original dispossession, an opening of man to a before and an after, a dimension of existence that precedes and infinitely exceeds him. The eyes of modern man have lost the power to look, they are eyes with an empty gaze, eyes without hope, in which no longer shines « the enchantment of the distant » evoked by Benjamin. Beauty may be the only path that still grants him the power to lift his eyes and close them to open his soul to the emergence of the hidden, the invisible, a life, the true life, which comes from farther than oneself and is received as a gift.