For the biographer, it implies inscribing his words right at the junction between the endured life and a decided action both being more confronted to one another than giving any kind of interpretation. Besides, it means questioning over and over again the dialogue between both selves of one's former creative adventure through the careful observation of sculptures or paintings and through reading the whole of testimonies left by the artist. Hence, it means grasping once again some kind of genesis, i.e. playing once again some kind of relationship to the world. It means showing how a work may delineate the logic of a life fulfilling itself , how it unfolds it and makes it readable, how from top to bottom a being organizes himself within his own creation and deepens his own presence to himself, whereas at the same time he straightens his art onto an ever more radical quest. Elsewhere he mentions experience as being closely linked to the creative gesture.
Man is no volume but concern, less a history than a principle or a pain to be there.
Hence the expressive simplification. Step by step, since the younger years in Stampa to the small churchyard of Borgonovo, Yves Bonnefoy follows Giacometti, that very man who walks within himself. Bonnefoy is careful to restore the vast arrays and the paradoxes of a very complex trajectory. Both observer and biographer of the work, he gives us its whole life back. For example he checks that in the lithographs to which Giacometti devoted the end of his life, one can find the urge for an adherence to the world at the end of a life's course that seemed thoroughly dominated by the impossibility to dwell in it.