Text of Marguerite DURAS (Texte en Français)

It is evening,
What you first see of the painting, it is an evening sky. A light-dark-sky, lagoon like, hardly damp, filed with sadness. It is from a small clear ramp-on the road side or that of a window, a step, that the sky is beeing seen.
On the ramp, standing up, there are two white stones, two big pebbles rolled up for centuries by torrential rain. On these pebbles there are scattered colors, light rusts, lichens, but barely, tars, roots, common marks.

This death, this sky, it was Venice.

I am talking about this painting because it is on its own, the other-those I call the Canvases of Darkness from a group, I haven't seen them separatly. I saw it was magnificent, it was developping a sort of expansion of the mind, colored with fabric, light effects, one can talk here of a sash of light, black, not of a standard, no, but of a black light, and also of an underlying black ink that overflows and edges.

When there will be no one on earth. When we will live under the mountains, the twillight in Venice will be the same.

The paintings-with-black will no,longer recall any place, except the talent of the painter Laverdac, her music of colors, the subtelty of her drawning, the closeness, the passage from one episode to the other, the film of painting being done.

"The windows of Neauphles", this is why I use the title of "black"paintings-It would seem to me that it is in the house of Neauphles-le-Château that some paintings started to be painted. I would say that resorting to the windows of Neauphles or esorting to the castle of Chambord, it doesn't exist, it is what I believe. She paints everywhere, alive or dead, Laverdac. Light is everywhere, and in Laverdac's head it is often dazzling. Even the light of Venice, it is in her head.
The imagination, it is you, Laverdac, it is not the outside world. If you had been to Venice, you would have done the same dazzling sky as the one on the canvas. This reference to the model, to the outside world : it helps to ward off the extreme solitude of the painter.
The beauty of your canvases, maybe you do not know it, you do not know anything about it, you are ignoring Laverdac. You are in a forest. But be careful, in the forest, you are alone.

I am coming back to the canvas called Venice-the objects I see on the canvas, behind the wall, are dead objects. It is very frightening. I didn't see any "exit door" to this painting. I think about this painting every day. It doesn't open onto anything else, it is not even an approach to a sense, it would be like the sketching of a new category- that of the loss of consciousness : one doesn't know what one does, what one really sees, and it is here, on the canvas.
If it was close to something what you paint, if one could say it,
It would be close to Music.