Bernard Quentin
Honeycomb Furniture
1967

Led home into oblivion the sociable talk of our slow eyes.

Led home, syllable after syllable, shared out among the dayblind dice, for which the playing hand reaches out, large, awakening.

And the too much of my speaking: heaped up round the little
crystal dressed in the style of your silence.

— Paul Celan, Below, trans. Michael Hamburger

Pistilos, from Inner Light series
Flor Garduño
Mexico, 2000

Jean d'Udine
L'Orchestration des couleurs, analyse, classification et synthèse mathématiques des sensations colorées
Maison d’éditions scientifiques, littéraires et artistiques A. Joanin et Cie
Paris, 1903

Erik Gunnar Asplund
Woodland Chapel
1920

Gardar Eide Einarsson
Caligula (Resonances)
2009

Martin Barré
61-T-12
1961

Manuel Álvarez Bravo
Isabel Villaseñor
1935

All
will be difficult to say:
the real word
is never easy.

All will be hard:
pitiless light
excessive living too
conscious of being.

All will be
able to wound. Will be
aggressively real.
So real it rends us.

There is no pity in signs
nor even in love: being
is excessively lucid
and word is dense and wounds us.

(All words are cruelty.)

— Orides Fontela, Speech, trans. Chris Daniels

Alexander Calder
Silver Bed Head, special commission for Peggy Guggenheim’s New York apartment
1946

Agnes Martin
Untitled
1961

Henri Laurens
Femme à L'Oiseau
1922

“By falling asleep, I fall inside myself: from my exhaustion, from my boredom, from my exhausted pleasure or from my exhausting pain. I fall inside my own satiety as well as my own vacuity: I myself become the abyss and the plunge, the density of deep water and the descent of the drowned body sinking backward. I fall to where I am no longer separated from the world by a demarcation that still belongs to me all through my waking state and that I myself am, just as I am my skin and all my sense organs. I pass that line of distinction, I slip entire into the innermost and outermost part of myself, erasing the division between these two putative regions.”

— Jean-Luc Nancy, The Fall of Sleep, trans. by Charlotte Mandell

Robert Mapplethorpe
Flower Arrangement
1986