Without separation, no contact. Separation is the necessary precursor to contact. It is irrelevant whether a painted thing is a being or a non-being. Painting confirms the painted thing as being as such. The lemon is the lemon. There is nothing outside the lemon which is the lemon. Obviously lemons can cease to exist. In such a scenario, the painted lemon would now be a painted memory of a lemon. Memories, therefore, are the transcendences of being (which is tantamount to saying that memories are being itself, this especially so since we do not even have the faintest clue as to what being could be). A bus follows its route, and at various points on its route, it stops to pick up or drop passengers. The bus could potentially follow any from an infinite number of different routes. What defines the bus route is this series of momentary halts at pre-indicated points on the journey to be taken by the bus. The lemon is the lemon and only the lemon. The moment of first glancing at a lemon, of turning the neck (and with it the head) in the direction indicated as occupied by the lemon, is the first shot of the lemon. After that, the lemon can very well be painted. A photograph may very well look more real than a painting, but that is willful deception. ([Unnecessary] detail is best resolved by automatic apparata.) A painted lemon need not look exactly like a lemon simply because only the lemon is the lemon. The word is the unit of being; language is its own measure.
The question would be: what about geometry? Geometry is its own being, has no being other than itself. But does geometry elude ‘the photographic’? A geometric painting is a painting. Such a kind of painting is indeed a thing – but it is not wallpaper. You can have Mondrian-inspired wallpaper, but that is not the same thing. A true Mondrian is an exemplar of a decaying permanence. It is impossible to destroy a Mondrian. (Although the canvas may very well start to rot and fall to pieces.) Even in this nothing, the Mondrian still hangs on the wall. A Mondrian eclipses its own time.
Every image is a point of origin; at the origin, ‘the photographic’. Time eclipsed by time.
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