THE STRUGGLE OF JACOB the-struggle-of-jacob | Page 33

During the execution, for the first time I posed myself the
question - put off until now by certain overriding compositional
requirements - “But who is who?”, “Which of the two is Jacob,
and which is his opponent, angel or God as he might be?”.
Unconsciously I associated the orange with God, perhaps
influenced by the Indian traditions that correspond the three
primary colors with the three intrinsic qualities of reality, with
the three guna: the yellow to sattva, brightness, purity,
virtuosity, wisdom, spirituality; red to rajas, activity, passion,
desire; blue to tamas, ignorance, torpor, indolence.
But those accounts did not correspond to the positioning of the
two figures. Until a painter friend, dropping by to see me, said
“What a beautiful incarnation of Jacob! It gives the sense of his
humanity!”. All my hard-won provisional interpretation was
overturned in a moment! And it all made sense to me! It is the
non-colour that pertains to the transcendent. It is we who
incarnate ones, those “coloured”. It is Jahweh - the gray J - that
assails Jacob from behind and clasps him, which overcomes him
in their verbal confrontation and embraces him with his blessing.
As far as the texts are concerned, I usually include written
words in my paintings, or at least graphic characters. It's a
method I have used since the very beginning of my output. On
the other hand much visual art has always made use of
inscriptions. In the East, especially in China and Japan, it is
traditional to associate the calligraphy of poetic texts with
images. Medieval frescoes often incorporate captions, of the
names of character, or of actual phrases. For modern art, we
only have to remember Magritte's “Ceci n'est pas une pipe”
(“This is not a pipe”) or pop art in general that has sublimated
the language of mass communication (advertisements, comic
books) and its writings.
Utagawa Hiroshige, 1797-1858
Arazzo di Bayeux, 11th Century