The Endless Theory of Days: The Art and Poetry of Gérard Titus-Carmel seeks to set forth the case for the special, multiple genius of a man who, despite the experience of a biting melancholy resulting from loss, despite an ‘indefectible feeling of estrangement from the world’, despite, too, the corrosive sense of art’s, of languages’s, deceptiveness, has never lost sight of a curious duty to the shadows that haunt and that, with now a strangeness that smiles, yet beckon toward ‘the very place, finally clarified and recognised, of pure evidence. [The place,] that is, where beauty is named’. This place, Gérard Titus-Carmel may feel, lies no doubt impossibly beyond the strict locus of his art and his writing, but it is a place he has struggled with dignity and unceasingly deployed energy to bring to a semblance of incarnation in a vast plastic and poetical oeuvre that has stirred, and will continue to stir, the minds and hearts of all those – from Derrida and Bonnefoy, Alain Robbe-Grillet and Pascal Quignard to Jacques Dupin and Marie-Claire Bancquart, and countless others – who have witnessed its exquisitely solemn unfolding over, today, more than forty years.
