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Prefiguration, Configuration, Refiguration
At this point, Paul Ricoeur, the eminent French philosopher, can help us with his theory of the text to better understand the
paintings on exhibit here. A painting, we recall, is a text. There is a prefiguration of the painting in life insofar as the
painting arises from the lived experiences of the painter. The painting-text, however, is neither a mere replica nor an identical
reproduction of life. Through a creative dynamic activity of composition, the painter brings about a novel arrangement of reality
in his painting. In mimesis or dynamic imitation of reality, the painting comes up with a creative "synthesis of the heterogeneous."
This creative synthesis is what we call the configuration of the painting as text. With this configuration, the painting undertakes
a break from the preexisting reality. The painting re-creates reality but in accordance with itself, as painting. André Malraux
appreciated this task of creative synthesis when he remarked: "Great artists are not the transcribers of the world, they are its rivals."
What is remarkable about modern painting in the twentieth century (when it goes beyond the figurative and turns truly abstract)
is that it helps us discover dimensions of experience that did not exist prior to the work of art. It is because Jose Joya does not
make a duplicate of "aerial view of rice paddies" that Granadean Arabesque (1958), has the power to generate feelings we may not have
felt till then before vistas of ricefields and plains.
What is unique about Ricoeur's theory of the text is that he does not confine the meaning to its configuration or composition. Meaning
is not just about relationships of colors, lines, forms, space and texture. Meaning is not only the sense of these elements. Meaning is
also in the reference—reference to the viewer, and to the world. Aside from prefiguration, configuration, there is transfiguration or
refiguration of the text in the reception of the viewer. It is this response of the viewer which completes the essential meaning of the
painting.
The meaning of a painting then is neither to be found in the intention of the artist which is supposed to be intuited in Romantic
hermeneutics nor to be arrived at in the Formalist analysis of the painterly elements of the painting. The meaning of the painting is
neither behind nor in the painting but in "the world of the text" unfolded by the painting. This "world of the text," which may be
hospitable or hostile, refers to a possibility, a singular way of being in the world. What a painting then offers, whether it be figurative
or nonfigurative, is a pro-position, a proposal, a way of inhabiting the world here and now in order to become more human. Looked at in
this way, we can appreciate why certain abstract paintings only seem to be cut off, to retreat from our daily lived world. If abstract
paintings seem like signs that retreat from the world and establish a gap with ordinary reality, it is only in view of reconnecting on a
deeper level with rea1ity. The fascinating phenomenon seems to be that the wider the gap, the more forceful and intense the biting power
of the work of art on the world of our experience. In liberating itself from the illustrative and anecdotal, modern abstract art attains
the jevel of the universal, the level of the spiritual. It renders visible the invisible. it becomes, in Emmanuel Levinas' terms,
"an indiscretion with regard the unsayable."
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Lopez Memorial Museum » Artscene: Zero-In: Private Art, Public Lives: Refiguring Modern Philippine Art
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