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ABSTRACT
Painting, read in relation to the tableau, is the subject of this article. A case is made against translating the tableau as ‘picture form’ or ‘picture object’. Rather, leaving the term tableau untranslated seeks to recognize the dimensionality of the term as a temporal, conceptual, and compositional formation. The role of the tableau in the pictorial and theatrical arts is explored through reference to Roland Barthes' essay, ‘Diderot, Brecht, Eisenstein’. The term reflects the necessary distillation, distancing, cut, and composition that both disciplines share. For two contemporary painters, Christian Bonnefoi and Martin Barré, inherent in the concept of the tableau are operations of appearing, which counts on the invisible, of detachment, which counts on adherence, and discourse, which counts on a relation to ‘objection’ — all stemming from an insistence on the tableau's responsibility to address its limits. Consideration of the dispositif in the forming of the tableau recognizes the achievement of the tableau at the moment of the disappearance of the dispositif.