“Van Gogh is a painter because he re-collected nature as if he had re-perspired it and made it sweat, made it spurt forth in luminous beams onto his canvas, in monumental clusters of colors, the secular crushing of elements, the fearful elementary pressure of apostrophes, stripes, commas, bars, and we can no longer believe, after him, that the natural aspects of nature are not made up of these things. . . .

with color seized as if just pressed out of the tube,

with the imprint of each hair of his brush in the color,

with the texture of the painted paint, distinct in its own sunlight, with the I, the comma, the period of the point of the brush itself screwed right onto the hearty color that spurts forth in the forks of fire which the painter tames and remixes everywhere.”

—Antonin Artaud, from Van Gogh, le suicid’ de soci’t’, 1963; quoted by Charlie Gere in Art, Time and Technology, 2006.