AT the beginning of this drawing (or piece of writing, which is the same thing) is a faint line, a light pencil mark, hardly a scratch which transfigures the page. The page's spread of uniform and constant whiteness is infiltrated by a tight fault. An altered state establishes itself, and the drawing (or writing, it all depends) becomes possible, useful, necessary. The lines exist on the page, but they exist as strongly in the world in which we remain. Who hasn't experienced the intangible line separating us from each other, wherever we go and whatever we do ? On a day when it's miserable and weary, we only need a single observation of this topography reserved for each of us, and we come near to thinking of ourselves as a closed country whose external relations depend on a kind of displaced diplomacy allowing contact with the numerous, complex and ostensibly hostile worlds outside. No broken line can produce a genuine curve or a consistent form. For this, the line must be smooth and continuous, so that everything can begin to exist. We could imagine, illogically, that the world exists as a single line opening and closing all of the objects which make up the universe. If it was so, all representation would become a kind of signature, an elegant calligraphy outlining each thing, a childlike hieroglyph precisely designating what it showed. That's it: drawing would be the most direct form of writing, as in a child's dream. Drawing, speaking, even writing would become the apprenticeship of poetry. In the meantime, in the world as we know it, writing or drawing is much closer to tightrope walking. Placing oneself on the ridgeline is a notion which is equally appropriate for a draughtsman, or a writer, or a tightrope walker. How much care or attention is required by any of these to avoid losing their position of precarious balance, that of desiring to stay on the fine frontier between things. The straight line of a wire stretched between two peaks is probably not the same as the sinuous but orderly line of careful handwriting, uniform from one end to the other, ever since the day that downstrokes and upstrokes entered the museum of folk art and tradition. It's just as impossible to make any comparison with the flexible, living line of an observational drawing or one from imagination, transforming a pencil or ink line into objects that are almost real, into sentiments or feelings, into memories. But as it stands, it indicates this frontier which happily owes nothing to geography, the border where beings and things are still what they were, and already what they could be, on either side of the demarcation line. Advancing on the ridgeline corresponds to completing the drawing in the exact time in which the eye takes in the possible motif of representation. One way or another, it all comes down to attempting to understand the strange correlation between the interest we accord to whatever predestined events may be happening before our windows, doors, houses, with regard to what might be appearing from one moment to the next on the pages of your notebook or sketchpad. Appearing from one moment to the next, as if by magic, but with the support of the enduring familiarity of the seasons and with the alternating of day and night, of clouds and clear skies, obliterating details and leaving in the depths of the retina and of the memory no more than porous contours once again capable of receiving all the variations of numbers, colors, thickness, everything, in fact, which separates the work of art from the image.