The Haptic Imagination of Georges Limbour

Abstract

Being nourished by phenomenological philosophy, Georges Limbour is sensitive to Jean Dubuffet's Texturologies, which not only reveal “the flesh of the world” by emphasizing the “flesh of painting”, but also and paradoxically become the place par excellence where the he material imagination, as defined by Bachelard, finds its perfect illustration. This makes the contemplation of a Dubuffet painting trigger in Limbour a series of spooky images, attesting to the haptic power of these Texturologies and their ability to bring about absence through the strong presence of pictorial material.

The interest of this article is to show how the change of the pictorial paradigm, which marks the passage from iconic transparency to indexed opacity, paradoxically allows to anchor more concretely the pictorial fact in the immanent experience of the sensitive world and of thereby creating a haptic imagination that will make the singularity of Georges Limbour's literary work.