The possibility of conceiving images is directly linked to the discovery that they are not absence of verbal language.

It is not true that I create images like the gestures of the deaf and dumb because I cannot succeed in speaking; I do so because I prefer and choose not to speak, not to move my tongue, my mouth, my throat to give out sounds with which, by convention, I make myself understood by others.

The creation of images is thus a rebellion against spoken language, a rebellion against relations with others based on the pursuit of well-being; a rebellion which costs, as is well-known, not only solitude but even the risk of not being understood, of abiding with the doubt and the anguish of castration, impotence, madness.

The cowardice of our great men who pretend to abolish language and express themselves with images that reproduce external reality portrays the anguish which accompanies anyone whatsoever who wants to reproduce, to represent outside of himself, a fantasy of his own.

For we can state and underline that there are essentially two steps involved: the shift from articulated language to images as representation of external reality, which can be verbalized as pretending not to speak, and representation of internal images outside of oneself, which signifies truly renouncing spoken language forever.

This is possible, as the art of the last century demonstrates, insofar as the thought, the idea gains currency that this representation of internal images outside of oneself is not absence of language. In other words, it is not that one cannot speak but, more than not being able to speak, one commits this strange act of cutting one's throat and opting for silence. Silence which privileges the hands as a means for saying and for recounting one's own relationship with present and past reality.

Privileges extensively, we would say, the movement of the body which, the artist intuits, will be lost the minute one begins to articulate words, and we are thus confronted with an image of refusal of spoken language which is totally different from the loss or absence of spoken language.

Only refusal enables that regression to take place which leads to the past, to that which has happened, which happened in absolutely forgetten times and, perhaps, we do not even know what this refusal is, perhaps it is an image of silence, perhaps it is a first monster, a first monstruous image whereby an intelligent and genial adult human being no longer possesses the particular characteristic of human reality, no longer has, in order to express himself, that articulated sound which distinguishes the animal's mouth from that of a human being.

And so we must recuperate what we lost when we began to speak and to walk, so that we walk poorly once we speak since we no longer have something that existed before the realization of the strength of the body which moves on its own without needing a cane or another person's hand.

And this something cannot be anything else than what we call internal images.

The silence which accompanies our dreams makes us recuperate the colours, the forms and the figures of what we have seen, heard, thought; but it does not make us move our body, which lies there inert, the indispensable condition for images to emerge in the mind. When the body moves, as we wake, only a vague memory of them remains.

The fusion between internal images and the material reality of the body never or almost never takes place; evidently something happens when we have to stand up alone on our own feet, so that moving becomes a necessary physical fact involving convergent and divergent forces which produces an architecture without a soul.

And so the artist has to, wants to, recuperate this soul which has gone away and which is an image or certainly many images, like those that are depicted when human deambulation is represented in its various movements. A film in which placing the numerous static single frames next to each other determines the vision of a movement which does not exist in fact.

Artists have defied this splitting by painting or sculpting in a waking state with the movement of their bodies.

The images become static, that is dead, each time they detach themselves from the body to become mental representation or external figurative art.

Placed on a canvas or composed in marble, they are the single frames of a film which exists in the mind, in the memory of single figures formed in the brain as a result of external perception.

Later on no, later on they went further and little by little they erased recognizable external perception and the forms of Matisse appeared, the necks of Modigliani.

And then even more so, it is no longer a question of deforming the external figure as a drunkard does, but of rendering it unrecognizable, destroying it, breaking it up into bits, as does Picasso when he realizes that the reproduction of external images is a horrible negation of internal perception and fantasy.

The vision which makes for a healthy and normal relationship with reality is, in fact, a normalization, a conditioning which leads to being able to keep company with others without conflict, lacerations, clashes.

For everyone, seraphically, a tree is a tree - no question about it - and we all agree, the sea is the sea and we all agree and, once again, the artist can no longer agree because this signifies the death of internal fantasy, so he represents a monstrous, unreal tree which does not correspond to external reality.

Then, going still further, he represents human reality as monstrous, abnormal, not in the sense of representing pathological monsters - the child with two heads or the calf with two legs - but rather he succeeds in representing something which does not exist in reality and in history, inexistent, that has never been thought of and, more than thought of, imagined in men's minds.

The representation of existing monstrosity, of evil, of destruction, are still reproductions of reality, which could almost lead one to think that Guernica is not a work of art because it represents a reality: the fragmentation, the destruction, the death caused by external violence.

Perhaps, precisely, in the fragmentation that Picasso depicts one can recognize something which is possible, that a cut-throat does something that can be reproduced by an artist or a photographer: the absurd painting of Les demoiselles d' Avignon.

We could thus discover that the direction art takes in creating something that has never existed - which cannot be accomplished by applying force to matter and deforming it, that is its natural images - is the one which leads towards the absolutely new, that which is not reproduced but created, with the insoluble suspicion that we are dealing with an absolute transformation in which the preceding is no longer recognizable.

More so, the tendency towards the creation of absolutely new images, the search for a monstrosity which is impossible in material reality but possible in internal fantasy, almost like creating something from nothing, from the elimination of one's relationship with the world as if one had never seen nor heard nor known it - then the creation of images is absolutely new and original.

The artist's challenge becomes a challenge of verbal thought and language if we read the confrontation between verbal thought and language which discover absolutely new things by defining them, and the internal fantasy of the artist which discovers things having refused verbal thought and language; and he runs the risk of not discovering anything, but of inventing images out of nothing, putting into reality things that have never existed, as madmen do.

We could say that this monster no longer has any natural or human characteristics, but instead that, no longer possessing a figure, no longer possessing a form, it is no longer clear what it can represent. Perhaps Cézanne and Van Gogh attempted to achieve this moving towards pure colour, perhaps Chagall tried with his red horse.

Beyond figure, form and colour, beyond colour, we don't know, there is no other possibility of composing anything that can tell us about something that might have existed beyond birth.

The search for vital elements and for the possibility of recounting vital elements; and we have to search further before getting lost or stopping beyond colour; and that black, which is defined as absence of colour; and we have to go on searching until we reach the thought-memory that we speak; and then we have to try to touch that strange and impalpable thing which can be any colour without changing its essence: the line.

Having said that, the word immediately unleashes all the images and thoughts stolen from that other unknown and undefined form of art which is architecture and constructing.

A way of making which we consider to be different from that of other forms of art: architecture is peculiar to prisoners who can walk only if they pick up the ball which is chained to their feet.

I mean to say that if a painter or a sculptor can be estranged from nature and human reality, an architect cannot be estranged from nature and human reality, and building implies a strange unhealthy or sublime love for nature and for fellow human-beings.

So perhaps we cannot impose images, colours, forms, figures; we have to do something which - in the first instance - defies the laws of gravity in the indispensable movement towards the heights intrinsic in every architectural form.

We conceive the line, and in particular the line of the arch, as a structuring and supporting element, and it is simply an image that has lost itself, we might call it an abstract element in absolute, non material, that must - in order to be - concretize itself in a pile of bricks and in a column.

An element, in effect, which does not exist insofar as we can consider that it is precisely in the act of touching that the intimate contact is determined, and the line is created - beyond the appearances which would give the impression of a fusion - precisely in the feeling of the two subjects which makes a line of demarcation between them.

This is what we have to do when we construct an arch or a column; in intimate contact with nature we distinguish, we define the column and nature as two different entities, in the identity of the column constructed by man who will never be able to construct a tree.

A tree is born from the earth and creates itself through its own vital force, no artist can do this, and we are clearly not concerned with the figure or the form of the column, whether it is doric or squared-off armoured cement, what interests us is the demarcation, the definition, the Greens would call it the violence, which is inscribed on nature when a construction is placed in it.

And, in the definition which we carry out while placing the construction, it is as though we gave a name to things, as though things did not have a name, so we say that perhaps the natural environment does not have images.

It is we who make the image when we trace a line of demarcation between the right part and the left part, and we begin to define the image with a line when we break up what we must consider to be, instead, a symbiosis among the elements of nature itself which evidently do not have frontiers between one and the other.

Two trees with well-defined figures, one next to the other, evidently - in this sense - do not have a defined image even though they do have a clear manifest figure.

In the painter's and the sculptor's representation one can, we all can, forget the relationship with the world and with others. The architect cannot and, insofar as he alters the natural figure of the environment, we have come to know that he commits violence on nature because he imposes an image from the moment he starts tracing lines and distinguishing a pine tree from an oak.

The architect thus, by his very nature, rebells against the definition of art as the reproduction of natural things. He has ceased to be a painter and sculptor, he no longer reproduces copies of things which already exist.

He discovers, or perhaps he is only obliged to hypothesize, to think of an internal image which he must then reproduce in external reality.

He cannot remake that which the laws and the rhythm of nature have already made, he is obliged to make something that nature cannot make. Nature cannot construct walls and build roofs.

And if we reflect that the starting point of architecture is the act of inhabiting, we also have to think that, in that moment, a revolt took place against natural movements and rhythms that were no longer in harmony with human reality.

Man stopped acting like lions who seek refuge from the rain in a cave, and said that having the rain beat down on him was no longer natural, and he built a roof, he built the walls of his hut so that he no longer saw nature around him and separated himself from it.

In this way he placed himself in the center of the world, refusing for ever to be just any natural element.

He defined himself, we can say, demarcating himself from the surrounding environment, tracing a line of separation between himself and nature and perhaps, in this way, creating an image of himself, designing himself sharply in the world or, just the opposite, he acted in this way because, unlike plants and animals, he had formed an internal image.

Up to that moment he had drawn bisons and gazelles on the walls of the cave, he had practised the art of Michelangelo and Raffaello, then he went out and he lost the image and the figure and, in building roofs and walls, he used construction as his only defense against nature and to define himself, and in his construction he had just one element which was the line, which separated the surrounding things one from the other, defining them.

He used the line and we do not know if he knew that, in so doing, he risked drawing an image of himself; he might draw it ugly, crooked, small, wretched and banal, that image of himself which he had carried out of the cavern had to be reconstituted, recomposed by using the line which gave it definite contours.

In seeing, distinguishing, naming the pine from the oak, in going beyond the simple perception of green or of generic foliage or woods, he wrote with his mind words which afterwards could have been pronounced with the mouth and the tongue.

And we are not concerned with knowing whether, historically, articulated language came after the possibility of creating and recreating images; we are concerned with reflecting on the link between articulated language and images made in the mind and reproduced externally.

We repeat: if painting, sculpture and music can exist without modifying nature, if we can consider that the image depicted in a painting or carved in marble does not modify any earth which is excavated, any tree which is uprooted, if we can consider that the sound a composer makes can be bounced back by the echo of the mountain without modifying it, this is not the case for architecture which stamps the sign indelibly on the environment, like the brand burnt into calves to become a memory for all.

Images kept for oneself, if recounted by the painter and by the sculptor they are images, by the architect they are made materially and, in this material composition and realization, it is as if he allowed others to enter into the very image which he has fabricated.

In truth, the painter and the sculptor reject the desire of others, as does the rocky wall from which the echoed voice rebounds. The architect who has possessed nature by imposing on it, putting into it an image of his own, is destined afterwards to resign himself to being possessed by others: the house will be inhabited, the bridge will be crossed, the road will be trodden on.

His constructions are destined to be used, possessed, directed towards the well-being of others. The works of artists who are not architects are like women who are bought but can never be touched, the work of the architect is everyone's and for everyone.

Strange destiny of the architect's fantasy: precisely insofar as it places in nature something that nature does not have and never can have, that which is introduced becomes like the other, similar to the other, almost indistinguishable from the other itself. An architectural work placed in a forest becomes a part of the forest itself, as though it looses its unnatural origin and becomes like the trees which are formed on their own without the hand of man.

Born as a element defined outside of and perhaps against surrounding nature, the architectural construction places itself within the natural environment, and in this realization it loses its characteristic of extraneous element, designed aprioristically, far from the milieu to which it is destined, and becomes an element common to the other pre-existing natural elements.

It loses the definition of the line; the preconstituted image introduced into the milieu becomes real and material, it fuses with the surrounding milieu, leading to the consideration that perhaps it is easier to transplant a tree and put it in another place than to move a house to a different spot than the one in which it was constructed.

We must consider that the architect, once he has created the image and built the construction, has gone mad in thinking he has been able to create a natural thing which has moved and formed itself by means of an internal force of its own; he has made something and, by forgetting completely that he made it, renders it in fact a component of the vital world, plant and animal; he has to leave it and abandon it, like a woman who goes to another country as the wife of another man.

Abandon, forget, recreate, in effect the architect cannot always remember the same story or repeat the same image.

Images once created, things made have to be forgetten with or without even the hope of being able to create new ones.