Quotes by Gaëtan Picon

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The work of art...offers itself to the mind as an object of inquiry, of inquiry, of perplexity.

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There has never been an art of instinct, of blind spontaneity; any work engages a consciousness, even if it does not confuse itself with it.

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There is no creation without consciousness…

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A work is all the more valid the more fully it realizes the essence of art.

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Above the work, the consciousness of the creator and that of the lecturer tend to meet in the same fundamental question.

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To publish is to perfect the existence of the work by the only conceivable means: its introduction into the common domain of consciousness and life.

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The works we love always seem newly born; they alone know neither to die nor to depart. When we resume one of them, it's like entering a familiar house where we won't have closed all the doors yet; and we enter those new rooms without the anguish that makes us fear that a loved one will die here...

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But, an art is not art unless the work remains an object in his eyes. Lack of concern for duration is the sign of an art that disavows itself: it is the work of the journalist, of the speaker, of life and action. Any true artist is obsessed with lasting…

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If the ambition of glory has as its object the name and the man, the desire for a duration concerns only the work...

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The obsession with duration is inseparable from creation, but it is not confused with the obsession with glory. Glory has other ways, and the imperious presence of the desire for glory refuses more than it authenticates the sincerity of a vocation...

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With the great works which at every stage of our experience in art we learn to know better, we live as we would like to live with the beings we love; out of destiny.

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To live in the knowledge and love of art means not to grow old, not to lose, not to forget.

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The "homeland of paintings" and poems, novels and symphonies opens to us the triumphant refuge of an eternally innocent humanity: of a world where pain exists with joy, where blood and death are not forgotten, but where they have lost their smell of defeat for to have become their own song…

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Like the other activities of the spirit, art has no human meaning except by daring to be what it can be: a grand and indestructible language, an uncondescending stake in which men will learn to recognize, for the benefit of their common power, the image of their conquered life and redeemed...

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Like the brightness of the sun in the turbulent wave, it shines at once in the lofty images of art, before it sinks back into nothingness, the vain and tumultuous world of human anguish and ecstasy, raised to a kind of indestructible eternity. We who will die perhaps one day call the eternal man in the middle of the moment...

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Rich in exceptional intensity and dominating our lives, the moment of high aesthetic emotion seems to transcend the order of time and belong to the eternal...

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We call beauty any form, any word that gives us this mysterious joy. Mysterious, and also inexhaustible, endless joy...

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We know the suggestion of eternity attached to the work of art - and that a "thing of beauty" is a joy forever...