Ochre Serenity

"Let me return to the mediocre painting that I earlier had my eye on: how can I describe it in its own phenomenality? A generic scene so ordinary, displaying a house, a servant at the window, the animals and a man outside, vegetables and fowl, etc., cannot be analyzed as such. First, because strictly speaking it is impossible to identify it with and by its characteristics as a real being (size, mounting, etc) which would suit so many other objects--it's not a question of a subsisting being. The same goes for the objects it represents intentionally, objects that can be confused with an infinite number of similar ones on similar canvases. And for that matter, its first function is not to instruct us about these objects; as a painting, it has no utility--it is not a question of a being ready-to-hand. What remains once these two identifications have been reduced? For some element does indeed remain--by which it keeps precisely the rank of a painting.

But what do I see when I see with phenomenological rigor? Not the framed canvas, nor the country objects, nor even the organization of the colors and the forms--I see, without any hesitation, the ruddy and ochre flood of the day's last light as it inundates the entire scene. This luminosity itself does not strike me as a fact of color; rather, this fact of color strikes me only in that it makes me undergo a passion: that, in Kandinsky's terms, of ochre tinged with gold--the passion undergone by the soul affected by the profound serenity of the world saved and protected by the last blood of the setting sun. To see the painting, to the point where it is not confused with any other, amounts to seeing it reduced to its effect. The effect of serenity defines the visibility of this painting--its reduced phenomenality. Its phenomenality is reduced--beyond its beingness, its subsistence, and its utility--to this effect: ochre serenity.

Painters look for this phenomenality when, the painting having been completed (or almost so), they wonder to themselves, "ce que cela donne, what [effect] it gives off." What more does a painting give besides what it shows in showing itself as object and being? Its effect. What more does the painting offer besides its real component parts? Its effect. But this effect is not produced in the mode of an object, nor is it constituted or reconstituted in the mode of beings. It gives itself. The painting (and, in and through it, every other phenomenon in different degrees) is reduced to its ultimate phenomenality insofar as it gives its effect. It appears as given in the effect that it gives.

Thus is defined the essential invisibility of the painting, which we can pass by because there is nothing objective or ontic to see in it. In the end, for every reduced being, all that remains is the effect, such that in it the visible is given, is reduced to a given. The painting is not visible; it makes visible. It makes visible in a gesture that remains by definition invisible--the effect, the upsurge, the advance of givenness. To be given requires being reduced--reconducted--to this invisible effect which alone makes visible. Nothing has an effect, except the phenomenon reduced to the given."

--Jean-Luc Marion, Being Given, 51-52