Poetry-Paleo on Sitaudis by Didier Arnaudet

Boiled crab

It all starts here with the landscape. The landscape is a crossroads where elements relating to nature and culture, geography and history, personal trajectory and societal upheavals, reality and the imagination meet. It is a landscape that arrives “without knocking”, “without a start or frequent traveler lounges”, “with a progressive presence” and “without a climax”. It's like a game of cards where the assets are the site, the body, the look and the image. It is therefore a nomadic, confusing material, without prohibition or claim, which borrows, in a surprisingly active jumble, from the Basque Country and its legends, from Paleolithic art, from the poetry of Emily Dickinson and from an effervescence sensations, memories, feelings and emotions. Maxime Morel also practices vertical digging, opens breaches and penetrates reality in stages by questioning its successive layers, multiplying its facets and bringing up all its possibilities. It releases a fragile balance which has the resources of water in all its forms: living, dormant, widespread, hazardous, transparent, sinuous, bounding, violent, carried towards elsewhere, linked to other elements, transformed into moving ground, in mist, in cloud. Everything is fluid, undulating, inconstant. It's overflowing everywhere. No more protective dike. It goes overboard. Everything is birth. Everything is disappearing. Strangely, effectively bipolar.

Maxime Morel neglects no opportunity to base his poetry on Paleolithic art, “the most recently discovered artistic form”. She shares with him the same idea of ​​“surveying”, “vibration” and “slowness”, and the same refusal of “ostentatious”. She also needs a lot of time to let her motives appear: “You must then choose a very particular point of view, accustom your gaze to a new logic. It's extremely moving. » Maxime Morel is a hunter on the lookout. His method consists of waiting: “looking, spending time looking outside, is a way of feeling empathy, of understanding how things work, of being able to love, hate or fear them deeply, of grasping also the beauty, and in a certain way, of being in discussion with these things that we look at; to bring about speech between oneself and the landscape. » Thus, come the words. They assemble and become denser. They crossed the landscape.

Such an approach is based on techniques of fragmentation and collage whose effects are highly transgressive and produce the accidental, the decentring and ultimately a singular liveliness. We discover a constant principle of fragmentation and rapprochement which merges the abstract and the physical, the literal and the figurative, the trivial and the sentimental. The writing presents itself as a character who calls, spells and peels the landscape, that is to say everything that surrounds it and in a certain way shapes it. This character, always so intensely engaged in his momentum, is of course called “Writing”. Writing, “it seems as if his eyes have no eyelids”. Writing “continues to watch even when everything is turned off”, “when everything is under lock and key and under alarm”. Writing-Endorphin “doesn’t wash off and his skin is very red.” Writing also has his weaknesses, “his legs no longer work either to operate the bike or to descend the stone stairs”. But Scripture doesn’t stay still for long. A shell that walks on the sand. Writing takes its pace. A wave carries it away. Writing “enters its landscape”.

Poetry-Paleo imposes a tumultuous and composite presence. It has all the qualities of José Bergamin’s “boiled crab”: “Be careful! Eating an apple is easier than eating an orange or pomegranate. And eating an orange or a pomegranate is easier than eating a boiled crab. The artistic work can be an apple, an orange, a pomegranate or a boiled crab, and there is no need to add that, in the latter case, it requires a greater effort to understand: not to mention that this is already a good sign, for art, we don't know which way to take it. It's a nice surprise.