The final aspect of a work of art is generally taken for granted. This holds true as well when we are presented with a piece bearing the writings of Michel Butor and Luc Joly on one and the same support. We accept it for what it is. And, as such, it exists. But in truth, the finished product calls for questioning as to the why and how of the work. Why have certain icons inspired teamwork between two artists both of whom are in the habit of searching to get at the heart of matters? Or, why, we might ask, does the search for meaning require the kind of - at once joint and complementary - imagery/inscription by two artists whose modes of expression fall into seemingly separate categories: literature for the one, and plastic art for the other? Might the question itself encompass its own answer ?

In his double role of plastic artist and pedagogue, Luc Joly has granted geometry a great deal of deliberation. The subject was in fact his first major avenue of thought, leading him - twenty years later - to come up with an impressive literary work entitled Structure. And it must be said, his approach in that work goes well beyond merely didactic definitions. For, as he writes, "the geometry to which we all respond and which governs a work is quite evidently a reflection of the author's capacity to conceptualize..." And in a similar vein, he quotes Sophie Taueber-Arp who "was the first to realize the expressivity inherent in classical geometric shapes, their capacity to concretize immaterial reality more purely than the various representational arts. It was she who demonstrated that geometry can surpass mere intellectual pleasure, and that it best expresses our feelings because it stands aside from the visible world".

By the same token, we are familiar with the system of reference on all levels that the author of "La Modification" uses within each of his novels, and with the coexistence in his work of several literary as well as extra-literary languages representing codes referred to by the author as his "stylistic colors".

The diversity of materials used comes to mind, from their juxtaposition in collage-fashion in Mobile (speeches, brochures, perfumes, colors...) to their kaleidoscopic disposition in Boomerang. The latter work arrests in midair the emphatic exclamations, assertions and interrogations that burst forth everywhere and anywhere. All meaning crumbles into chaos, a state of affairs the novelist Michel Butor puts into words.

Endlessly inventing the text of life itself, the author transcribes it into a score dealing with present time such as is observed, and future time such as can be glimpsed: Notre Faust, "variations on fantasia in opera fashion", is a realization carried out in 1962 in collaboration with the musician Henri Pousseur. In his painstaking quest, Butor tirelessly keeps modifying the score, hoping for "language that appears in all its aspects (...) to communicate with a whole network of immovable or movable resonators which are hence both destructible and permanent, capable of being resuscitated" as explained in Repertoire III. In 1971, The Dialogue with 33 variations by Ludwig van Beethoven on a Waltz by Diabelli again takes up the task of transforming a literary text into musical form in order to enlarge upon the theme. Elsewhere, in the scenario of Intervalle (1978), we discover the author himself, busily at work in a waiting room for travellers, that reservoir of countless fates stretching out in an anamorphic continuum...

Michel Butor produces book-objects where the typographic content seeks to steal the leading role from the kaleidoscope of raw life itself, of memory and of meaning. His work could not fail to appeal to Luc Joly, a specialist in geometry who so readily indulges in anamorphic quirks...

And better yet, in 1980 it was the painter who earned the title of author with the publication of his book: Shapes and Signs, a New Approach to Geometry. His text deals with the various hypotheses concerning the constitution of shapes thoughout man's ethnic past. The book's main thesis is that our cultural heritage represents a common denominator for current activities. That heritage leaves an imprint on all that is being written, marked and drawn, since "upheavals, wars and cataclysms have no effect either on our cultural roots or on the plastic and graphic shapes and structures of our time, which always tie in more closely with the physiology and basic psychological outlook of man than with his reactions to such events".

The unending recurrence of shapes conceived instinctually is a phenomenon the painter was able to corroborate for himself with the results of a survey he conducted in 1976/77 throughout Europe and North and South America. Joly asked his sample populace - people of diverse ethnic origins and from all layers of society - to transcribe in simple graphic terms the basic elements of their everyday life: man, woman, food, shelter, fire, hands... The results disclosed major similarities, quite to the distress of Joly who, in another context, contends that "the most striking aspect of his contemporary achievements is not necessarily that aspect most directly in touch with his own cultural heritage..."

Thus it can be said that both the plastic artist and the writer share the same basic concern with exploring the many avenues of artistic expression open to contemporary culture.

It was Joly who took of contacting Butor. He did so in 1985, at a time when the city of Geneva's flourishing economic status seemed to invite a wider scope of tourist attractions than the perennially renowned Lake of Geneva fountain and the League of Nations building. Here was a chance for the city's artists to convey the face and voice of Geneva clear around the globe. Michel Butor came up with the idea of, in own terms, fable cards: black-and-white folding flyers that would serve as supports for a dialogue to be carried out between a writer-poet and a painter-artist. The long cardboard piece would be folded to comply with the officially admitted postcard-size format, so that it could be sent through the mail. Sixteen artists participated in the Geneva 1986 image-by-mail project, which was conducted unter the auspices of the City of Geneva's Department of Fine Arts and Culture and published by Skira.

Michel Butor and Luc Joly interact with each other linguistically: "If the postage stamp on the envelope is upside-down..." is a comment Butor inserted between two of Joly's fable-inspired animals. With that remark, the author of Words in Painting - always spurred on by the thought of an adventure - sets off on a new itinerary, deliberately declining a compass. Indeed, who could possibly guess where Luc Joly's scribble-monsters lead? And then the two of them decided to do another project together, using a color screen this time.

Luc Joly provided the basic scrap piece: paper he structured by adding a few colors, curves, body elements - be it hands, eyes, mouths, noses -, here and there a few leering or blood-spattered monsters, a face or two engrossed in thought... Butor in turn travelled through Joly's scenery, sowing white little fragments of paper bearing the kind of exclamations, assertions, advisory and acquiescent remarks made by people awaiting their flight call: his comments reflect the traveller's waiting line attitude, his anticipation of the trip ahead, his superficial self-awareness in the padded chaos particular to airports. Le rhum des attentes, Les montagnes, Toi, ce sont des carrés d'ecriture, Tu essaies la clef, Je transmets le message... So many phrases pencilled in a generous range of colours. Next Butor pasted his paper fragments, scattering them across Joly's travel scenery, affixing them with tape of several colors, playing around with them by marking them with bars that cross over the underlying collage pieces, as if to defy their too orderly or too idiotic typography, perhaps to challenge their conformity to customary publicity regulations. How marvelous, the freedom of child-artists! Working on the tables of Geneva's School of Visual Art, it was an hour's journey up mountain peaks and down into pits, as if the drearily flat plains had no existence worth considering: a journey achieved by brain cells crying out in total silence. Later still, Joly once again worked the piece over, adding new cutouts to be subsequently colored...

The process runs the full gamut from a chaotically assembled reservoir of primary elements to the organization of chaos bespeaking eternal return. Cultural fragments, the channel-flicking travels of a television public, informal writing transformed into formal elements, colors, memory, nostalgia, frustration... As Luc Joly explains it: "I write out my images on happenstance supports already incorporating other supports, objects or telephone booth graffiti..." First tearing apart and then re-pasting back together, Joly's approach falls within the realm of anthropomorphism. And his vision, which extends from planarity to voluminosity, manages to avoid the rectangular format. For supports lie all about: all it takes is that they be garbed and that their interpretation be left open-ended, hence reversible. Indeed, that was already the artistic outlook adopted by the Surrealists, wont to combine the random quality of certain imagery with that of certain texts and their at once possible and impossible linkups.

Joly uncovers and traces lines that lead to shapes and forms, random imagery produced as by chain reaction. He re-claims colors and discards, in fact a whole past once use-full and evermore use-less, lest it be precisely by the artist as a misalliance from which to breed a radiant new mask of the future. "A programmed vision of necessary theater, immovable, permanent, resurging at every awakening to seduce anew for still another day", "Space perceived, or the joy of moving about, of becoming motivated, of availing oneself of other languages - for instance, in gestures or in colors-serving to forget, to lose, to leave, to leave behind, to betray": such were the titles Joly gave his large-scale works of allusion/illusion, at his November 1992 Geneva show in the former factory SIP.

All in all, it is far from surprising that Butor and Joly did indeed meet at the intersection of their respective lines. They started out from opposite horizons, but were to meet with each other in the mortal mimicry of a shared fleeting moment of time, before taking back up their separate ways.