Bernard Réquichot, Writing Tree

In the 1950s, the French painter and poet Bernard Réquichot (1929–1961) developed strange and seductive spiral figures. How to interpret them? Writing about his experiments, he captures the hesitating status of interpretation: “My paintings: figurative? No; abstract? Not that either. You can find crystals, tree bark […] in them; yet these things are not ‘represented’” (129; my translation).1 And a letter to Hubert Damisch from January 1958 offers some clues as to how his spiral drawings were made:

As for the drawings… it’s a kind of writing that I realized I had found by distraction. Noticing this distraction, I saw that [this writing] could become an illusion of various materials, often wood, which really intrigued me. I then worked more consciously on this ‘illusory writing’ and noticed that when it tended to combine rhythmically with itself, a second illusion was born: the image of something vague, often biological and naturalistic. (qtd. in “Exposition Réquichot” 42; my translation)

Often people see writing as a form of drawing. Réquichot says the reverse: drawing is part of the realm of writing. Hence the desire for interpreting what is seen, for discovering possible pictures of the world. For him the main examples of this biological “something” people could discover in his drawings/writings are tree bark or wood, as if the tree’s materials could show the figures of the not-represented.