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10-2022, tome 119, 3, p.421-447 - Paillet P., Paillet E. (2022) – « Le seul réel dans l’art, c’est l’art » : réalisme, naturalisme et illusionnisme des oeuvres d’art paléolithique

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10-2022, tome 119, 3, p.421-447 - Paillet P., Paillet E. (2022) – « Le seul réel dans l’art, c’est l’art » : réalisme, naturalisme et illusionnisme des oeuvres d’art paléolithique

« Le seul réel dans l'art, c'est l'art »* Réalisme, naturalisme et illusionnisme des Oeuvres d'art paléolithique de Patrick Paillet, Elena Paillet

 

Résumé : Investir le champ des images préhistoriques n'est pas un acte anodin. L'objet artistique est un puissant marqueur social et culturel. Il révèle des aspects particulièrement intimes des sociétés qui l'ont produit et peut servir le cas échéant à éclairer les mouvements qui les traversent, à évaluer la nature des échanges socio-culturels, à mesurer la qualité des partages de valeurs symboliques et à pister les relations entre groupe ou communauté au sein même de territoires physiques et de territoires symboliques qu'ils servent à baliser dans différentes dimensions. Les images reflètent une manière d'instruire en rendant visible le monde qui diffère de son exploitation induite par la culture matérielle. Les productions symboliques constituent donc une voie privilégiée vers la perception et la représentation du monde. Les négliger serait se priver de leur dimension idéologique ou de leurs intentions conceptuelles qui font parfois défaut aux classifications basées sur la seule variabilité typo-technologique des systèmes techniques (Fortea Perez et al., 2004). Encore que tous les systèmes ou les productions techniques ne soient pas toujours dépourvus de valeur esthétique et donc peut-être symbolique (Beaune et Hilaire-Pérez, 2012). Mais une fois acquise la conviction que l'oeuvre d'art est fondamentale comme matière à penser et comprendre les sociétés de la Préhistoire, on ne peut pas s'exonérer d'une réflexion sur sa forme, notamment dans le champ figuratif, et sur la manière dont elle traduit ou interprète la vie. L'objectivité des images est ainsi questionnée. Leur degré de fidélité au réel, souvent labellisé par les termes assez ambigus de « réalistes » ou « naturalistes », est également analysé sous l'angle d'une sémantique qui autorise le passage de l'étroit corridor entre images naturelles, images mentales et images artificielles. Loin d'une stérile guerre sémantique, cette nouvelle lecture donne à voir autrement l'iconographie préhistorique.

 

Mots-clés : art, Préhistoire, réalisme, naturalisme, illusionnisme, représentation, iconographie.

 

Abstract:  Alongside stone and bone industries and remains of hunted and consumed animals, the images placed on objects or walls constitute a gateway into the economic, social, cultural, ideological and symbolic heart of prehistoric societies. It is then necessary to study them, as these images are also a reflection of a visible world and, at the same time, of a vision of the world worth to teach. Prehistoric artists have borrowed from living world, especially animals and humans (very rare plant representations), a large part of their themes, even if abstract or geometric symbols, which are called signs, and some of which probably have figurative origin (objects, living beings, etc.), constitute an iconographic background. But signs, as fascinating as they are to study, are products of the pure imagination and the ideal over which we have little authority because they escape nature. Then to reassure us on our capacity to decipher this world of the images, we often approach it by the outside, i.e. by form, matter, technique or style. And it is the figurative representations that lend themselves best to this exercise. Don't we often say that prehistoric art is an animal art? It is a shortcut, but also a clever way to put aside the signs that resist us. Prehistoric man, as early as the Aurignacian period, excelled in the art of representing animals, at the same time as they hunted, trapped and consumed them. The symbolic and the hunting, the bestiary and the fauna, constitute the two poles of opposite appearance - but finally similar - of a network of complex relations between the man and the animal. The bestiary is not a reasoned and exhaustive inventory of living things. It is a symbolic selection, a cultural and allegorical vision. Prehistoric artists did not draw up a natural and zoological history of the wild animals they encountered, now extinct or emigrated, and even less a manual of anatomy, ethology or animal biology. It is obvious and the simple observation of animal images would be enough to convince us. However, we still practice this exercise of more or less literal reading of the representations, because we seek at all costs, by idealizing and exalting the supposed figurative realism of the painted and engraved animals of Prehistory, to take the prehistoric out of the primitive state in which it is sometimes locked up. But by practicing this, by dissecting images in order to describe their fidelity or perfection, we neglects the innumerable departures from the art of imitation, from reality quite simply. If prehistoric art can occasionally achieve a synthesis between the vision of the hunter, the one who knows how to see, and the hand of the artist, the one who knows how to express, we should not make a doctrine of it. Between eye and hand, there is a brain in which experience and imagination mix and feed each other. Whatever the words we frequently use to describe prehistoric animal art, "realist" or "naturalist", words that seem close but can also be contrary, they take us away from reality since mimetic accuracy has never been an objective. And how could it be so, since everyone has his own perception and his own interpretation of reality. Everyone sees the visible world and bears witness to it in his own way. The images of prehistory, and more particularly those of animals, are the manifestations of these multiple and subjective visions of the world of an individual nature, as the product of an interior glance, and social, as the product of the outside, visions more or less accommodated to collective constraints. As in the Middle Ages, the true nature of the animals during the Prehistory, the nature that the artists allot to them, resides more in the ideal nor the metaphysical, the true in some way, than in the scrupulous observation of the living, the reality.

 

Keywords: art, Prehistory, realism, naturalism, illusionism, representation, iconography.

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