The Innocent Eye Test (Mark Tansey, 1981)

It is the only work that has had such an effect on me. In the past I had looked with emotion at very different paintings by Dali, Johns, Rothko, Van Gogh, Chirico, Caravaggio or Balthus, but I had never immediately burst out laughing when I discovered a painting. I prefer to start with a more reserved, more intellectual, more critical approach.

And then, suddenly, expecting nothing, I ventured into Gallery 915 of the Metropolitan Museum of Modern Art in New York to come face to face with a painting large enough to allow for the depiction of a life-size cow in profile scientifically framed by a group of men as grey as it. An experiment. It was signed Mark Tansey. The innocent eye test!

And this Tansay had dared what others have never even dreamed of. It was the first time that a painter had so ostensibly mocked us, the spectators, the critics. A radical mockery as direct as Peter Handke's play Outrage au public! A crazy audacity. Because, after all, the artist was making fun of us precisely because we were watching his work. He was ironically probing the effect of reality that he was inviting us to experience at the same time. He laminated figuration with a figurative work.

Structurally, it is neither more nor less than a chleuasm. In short, he surrounded a nowhere with an enclosure and thus affirmed: "This is mine", just as someone else might have said: "This is not a pipe". It is for this no man's land that he opens that I love The innocent eye. This nothing is everything.