Cezanne Painting and Expectation

Cezanne's painting depends on a tension between the exterior object he was looking at and the surface on which he recorded what he saw and felt. In order to approach painting verbally, I have had to make some forays into other subjects that will help me deal with the essentially non-verbal discipline of painting. Van Gogh wrote to Theo that painters held their tongue, and he liked it that way. In deciding not to hold my tongue today, I am indebted to Saussure's theory of general linguistics, which although out of date, has proven a valuable tool to speak of painting.

Saussure famously advanced that signs in language are arbitrary and relate only to their own system, not to the object they refer to. Equally, in painting, the relationship between the pictorial elements such as the mark, colour and the line, and the reality they refer to is divorced. They only correspond through vision, that is, Cezanne did not paint his idea of an apple as a graspable entity, one that he had been familiar with since his early childhood - as we all have - but painted only what was immediately given to him through his senses. This at first non logical statement makes more sense when we discover that 80% of our optical nerves come from the brain and go towards the eyes bringing information to them rather than gathering information from them.

The painter, therefore, if he is searching for a purely visual truth, one that seeks to know the world for the first time, must fight against his own expectations that are rooted in previous experience as well as destroy the viewer's expectations in order to rebuild the purely sensible, immediate form of an object.

In order for the viewer not to revert to his experience, the surface of the painting must constantly hold the viewer in a state of immediacy by supplying information that at once does and does not refer to the object, say the apple, at hand. This, as Cezanne discovered, can only be done through sensation. Every time the viewer begins to only see an apple something happens on the surface that directs the attention from the object represented (say the apple) to the object representing (the painting). Continuous play between the signifier and the signified.

Expectations relate to the signified in such a strong way that only a hint of a still-life context and indication of red colour will make one think of an apple. The signifier should be the representation of the apple, when in fact it is of the much smaller order of the mark, and the line. The apple resulting from a layering of coloured marks and lines is only an accident.

Sensation, because given to the senses immediately has to do with the present, and expectation, because given by past experience has to do with the past.

The drawing also removes the viewer from the object and forces her to concentrate on the immediate form and sensation (the relationship between these is another matte). Equally, the relationship between marks separates the viewer from the signified and from expectation. Within the marks, their relationships, and the drawing are more abstract considerations that have to do with difference and meaning. In Cezanne, as in all of the great painters, no one mark is like the other because each one was dictated by sensation which cannot be exactly repeated. All repetition is done with small variations that create meaning (Saussure).