LE GIVRE. POUR UNE PHENOMENOLOGIE DE LA CRISTALLISATION,

On the trail of Caillois and Deonna, the imagery linked to crystallization, between the esthetics of nature and the Pathosformel of the eye, presents a twofold aspect: the autopoiesis of the crystal and the reverberation of its being a seer: a description moving between the artistic power of the game of art and nature, and the mythical power of the game of myth and nature. The phenomenological approach by Merleau-Ponty puts in brackets the esthetics and the mythical and shows the visible of crystallization in its relation to the invisible, to the shading-off, to the “spiritual side” of the petrified. The crystallization suspends the abitual perception. It is like a Medusa’s gaze turning things into stone, that removes things from the proteiform, changing (myth of Medusa-Perseus and myth of Proteus) perceptual gaze. On the trail of Klee and Cézanne, Merleau-Ponty let us discover another natura pictrix, another autopoietic form of figured painting: the topological visibilization we use to call figuration. In the vision according to the picture, according to the visibilization means, that is the colour, the needle-shaped white of the rime, is inscribed a new perception, no more pre-structural as in Caillois (butterfly’s wings), neither expressive-energetic, ocular, as in Deonna (Medusa’s gaze), but rather cardinal, elementary, a perception of the hinges of the visible, of the visible track that revets the telegraph wire, making it visibile, that gives the ontological directions, as the cruciform lines of Saint Andrew to the Heideggerian Sein.