PEINDRE LA CHAIR. LE MOUVEMENT DE L'IMAGE DANS L'OEUVRE DE CHAÏM SOUTINE

Title: Painting the Flesh. The image’s movement in Chaïm Soutine’s work The work of painters who lived in Paris at the beginning of the 20th century mainly consisted in a negation of representation which was not unrelated to the negation of the object-painting itself: Chaïm Soutine brings a deep radical change to this artistic approach. The purpose of our study, according to Soutine’s work, is not its painting, but the action of painting, of "painting the flesh," in order to redefine thereby painting as praxis, and, in turn, philosophy as a practice which must create its own making. Indeed, the denial of the paradigm of representation in painting led us to extend our work to the expressive dynamic reflection of contemporary art and especially to the foundations of philosophical practice considered in the essence of his expressive movement. In this regard, the theme of ‘Flesh’ is a perfect illustration, within painting and philosophy, of a dualism. Our work ambition is to go beyond this dualism. A critical dualism which polarises itself around the opposition between the image as a print-copy/ reproduction and the image as a self –referential. The ontological approach to the 'image' and the 'sensible', drawn by Merleau-Ponty's thought, defines the flesh as pregnancy, that is to say as a Being differentiating of itself which we can only apprehend by renewing our thought following the same differentiation of itself. Our analysis of Chaïm Soutine’s painting lead us to rethink the phenomenon of aesthetics, and, beyond that, to rethink the Being of every phenomena and every appearance without making reference to oppositional forms and ways of thinking from the idealist legacy of philosophy and aesthetics.