Sudden awakenings and the metaphysics of becoming

Roy Forget, “Holiday,” 2018, Oil on two linen canvases, 46 x 33 and 24 x 16 cm

I have been listening to podcasts from the French radio program « Nouveaux chemins de la philosophie » which has been a continued source of learning and interest while painting.  In a series of discussions around the French philosopher Henri Bergson, one of his ideas appeared to me as particularly pertinent.  He describes the sudden change in perception of those who face brutal unexpected demise, like a downhill skier flying off a cliff (and as the painting above describes, suddenly drowning for want of life jacket and inability to swim, or suddenly being eaten alive by a Great White).  

The sudden change in perception forced by the unexpected brutality of such death, the imminence of death, forces a reset in perception, where one is all at once without any interest in the future, where « becoming » as it were turns backwards and becomes a panoramic movement of the individual’s past — as one moves forward to death, one’s future becomes one’s past.  This sudden change in our attention to what would constitute an individual’s life history has become a common place notion in daily conversation, where one inevitably hears such expressions as « I saw my life flashing before my eyes. ». But there is a point that needs to be reiterated: the past becomes present.  Linear time is forced to take a U-turn and what is ahead is what is behind.

Of course, one does not have to die to have the past come to the present.  Proust’s Madeleine and displaced cobble stone are prime examples where daily experiences become conduits of «lost time» as long as one is in tune with it.  

Proust was a quintessential Bergsonian.  Bergson was a major philosophical figure during Proust’s time, he « was Paris », and as a side note, he married one of Proust’s cousins and they held a correspondance with each other.

My show « Lumière inépuisable » is about time, but not clock time, not objective time, where there is a start and an end.  It is about the past coming around, inhabiting the present, perhaps altering its perception, and crippling its desires, banishing its demands, risking it to peril.

Roy Forget :

Lumière inépuisable 

Exposition personnelle

Du 1 au 31 janvier 2019

Vernissage le jeudi 3 janvier à 19h

La Belle Hortense

31, rue Vieille du Temple

Paris 75004

Ouvert tous les jours de 13h à 2h