Aesthetic figures, and the style that creates them, have nothing to do with rhetoric. They are sensations: percepts and affects, landscapes and faces, visions, and becomings. . . It is like a passage from the finite to the infinite, but also from territory to deterritorialization. It is indeed the moment of the infinite: infinitely varied intensities. In Van Gogh, Gauguin, or, today, Bacon, we see the immediate tension between flesh and the area of plain, uniform color surging forth, between the flows or broken tones and the infinite band of a pure, homogeneous, vivid, and saturated color.  (Deleuze and Guattari, What Is Philosophy?)

The color is a color far from nature; imagine a vague memory of pottery buckled by great heat. All the reds, the violets, scored by the fire's blaze like a furnace glowing to the eyes, seat of the struggles of the painter's thought. All on a chrome ground sprinkled with childish bunches of flowers. Room of pure young girl. (Paul Gauguin, in Lettres, 8 Oct. 1888)

In motion, a body is in an immediate, unfolding relation to its own nonpresent potential to vary.  (Brian Massumi, Parables for the Virtual:
Movement, Affect, Sensation) 

back to main page