An Odor, an Image, a Title Found by Two And Two Thoughts That Brush Past Each Other

“The lips of the water pierce the forest.”

Ody Saban

Perfumes are an even more impalpable language, even more unknown, even more to come, even apparently more miniscule and ephemeral than that of caresses.

In this painting, the olfactory receptors of my nostrils, lost in the invisible multiplication of the smells of the flower, grow so large that my eye enters my nose. My head itself begins to ruthlessly flower, to tree, feeding on my ideas, crunching them one by one.

This morning, the immensity of my dreams blended with the image of a green tree: at the edge of my window and also in me, here, here, all inside, there is a plant that I barely know and yet which I cultivate, which I help to live.

In sniffing it, it is some tiny thing that comes in, like light when it is born, like the hope of a free life.

I tried to paint with my breath, with the oxygen that made a place in my heart.

What do you think? Look at this point as a very thin silk trail.

Thomas Mordant

I do not think or rather I do not know, not yet. I think where I am not yet. I leave from these ideas that you give me, this space that you open to me. I leave from this point and my thoughts will dance with your thoughts, spin around you.

This painting that you offer to me, I think I saw it born and develop. I think I remember. I think I capture a tiny grain of my memory. I open this grain full of floral scents from you and others coming from me.

This image where as we say “the lips of the water pierce the forest”, where you appear in a veiled garden, where I have long and often breathed …

I barely thought about it. Over some of your paintings, I think little and I reflect even less their large picketed mirrors of long scents. I let them think for me. I let your thought take me, settle in me.

I scarcely knew that it was even more a question of perfumes, here, than in most of your other paintings, than in all those jungles, all those scaffoldings of breath that you unfold around us.

Then, I recognized your scent that does not resemble any other, that impalpable and abrupt odor that I know so well and that I do not yet know, where I enter at this moment.

Ody Saban

And our nostrils open and throb, and our lips are closed in waiting, listening to two birds singing and responding…

Thomas Mordant
…in another space-time which seems to us faster than ours, but which crosses ours.

Ody Saban

But who knows…

Thomas Mordant

…The smell of birds ?

Paris-Vincennes 13 mai 2018