My daily life is made up of feelings that most of you know nothing about.
For a long time, I was ashamed of it.
I remember very well the circumstances
in which I discovered this difference.
I was four years old and wanted to express to my mother
the joy I felt watching the sun through a leaf
and I told her not about the leaf itself,
but the colors and sensations that were caused
by what I felt when I saw that leaf:
these yellow and green lines,
this very special taste, halfway between sugar, mint, cucumber,
that came to me following the ribs
and imagining a whole series of possible futures,
imagination, like a golden mist,
joy like shimmering water …
She just thought I was crazy.
And then, so, I hid it,
and growing up, I was frustrated to keep
these perceptions that seem very beautiful for me
and I tried to represent them in this painting that you see.
Immediately, thinking about these emotions,
I also found those I had felt
listening to this music, Verdi’s Va Pensiero.
(Music)
Synesthesia is not a disease,
it’s just a different perception of things
which leads senses that normally are not interconnected
to connect.
For example, you hear the E note,
and you see it blue or green.
You taste an apple and the taste of this apple
will evoke a geometric form.
It’s innate and it’s involuntary.
There is a multitude of different synesthesia,
according to debated evaluations,
it affects about one out of 2,000 people;
debated because most synesthetes do not know they are synesthete
until they discover the existence of the phenomenon.
Thanks to my synesthesia, my emotions, my thoughts, my associations of ideas,
as you could see, my little inner voice,
everything appears to me in the form of colors,
shapes,
tastes,
movements.
It enriches my perception of the world
and the paintings I’m trying to make to represent all of this
are about as faithful to the original perception
than a freeze frame compared to a three-hour film
or a photo of chocolate cake versus a real chocolate cake.
But it’s still a lot more revealing than words.
Words do not say anything about the world
and that’s what I tried to paint in this painting:
down on the left,
you have the reality, the emotions it inspires me, the thoughts,
above, the imaginary; at the crossroads of the imaginary and reality, the voice.
And little by little, you have this narrowing
by going to the right,
when it is necessary to convey all this inner wealth
in this tiny dead end that the words are.
Throughout my childhood,
I have wondered why we had not invented
specific words to say all this wealth.
Why we did not invent a specific word
to talk about the joy we experience
when we look at the sunlight through a leaf?
Why we did not invent another different word
to express the joy we experience
when we see one’s child again, when we see one’s spouse?
It has nothing in common, however.
Probably because it was not deemed useful
and in fact, recent research on synesthesia
would tend to show that we would all, as children,
have these extra nerve connections, explaining synesthesia.
But we lose them little by little.
There is no inevitability to that, the words are a frame,
a convention allowing us to communicate,
now, nothing forbids us
to preserve the richness of our perception.
Yet we do not do it,
we enclose ourselves within the frame of words,
we shrink our perception of the world to these words
while nothing obliges us to,
probably because we think that’s what others expect of us.
In ancient times,
studies carried out on ancient languages
showed that the colors were perceived in a very particular order:
first black, white, red, green or yellow,
and finally blue.
So this sea you see blue,
ancient Greeks saw it as purple, for example.
Conversely, where you see snow,
a Scotsman will be able to think of one of the 421 words
used in his language to talk about snow.
Of course, it has an impact on the way you see the world,
you perceive it, it is probably this change of scenery
that we seek by going to the other end of the planet
to discover new landscapes, certainly,
but also new ways of seeing, of perceiving.
And very oddly,
no one makes this trip that can be just as fascinating,
which is simply asking your neighbor:
“Your perception of the world, your little inner voice,
what does it say to you?”
If I make you travel in my synesthesia,
you will enter a world where to use the same word
remains the best guarantee not to understand each other.
When I worked in financial diplomacy about 13 to 14 years ago,
there was a very fashionable term,
it was “sound policies”,
which was used to designate the policies
what a country should set up
to receive assistance or debt reduction.
In the UN vision, “sound policies”
it was a global respect for human rights and not too much corruption.
For the IMF, it was balanced budget, period.
For the World Bank, it’s the UN’s vision, that of the IMF,
and then other things,
investments in economic development,
agriculture, urbanization, transport.
Now, these three international organizations,
you put them at the same table,
on the same text, using that same word,
visually, you see right away
that misunderstandings will be numerous.
You may be able to grasp the beauty of diplomatic language
which consists in giving the illusion of an agreement
when one is not necessary to move forward,
but you will also understand why there is need then
of a whole bureaucracy to handle what happens next.
To enter my synesthesia is also to understand an environment
where thoughts and emotions appear at the same time
like a satellite map and at the microscopic level.
I represented in this picture the vision that comes to me
when I think, in a novel that I’m writing,
at the meeting between the main character, Arthur,
and his friend Bérénice,
at a point when Berenice got injured,
the way they will fall in love and lose sight of each other.
Behind this overall vision,
you have lots more microscopic visions
which correspond to the chapter details,
to the characters’ personality elements.
For example, the table on your left
designates and illustrates how Arthur sees Berenice’s character.
A cheerful girl who is hopeful
but also presents dark incomprehensible ideas.
If I vary the circumstances of their meeting,
if they meet at the beach,
if Arthur’s character is different,
if Berenice loses her dark ideas,
immediately, the vision I’m going to have of the chapter will change,
both at the satellite level and at the microscope level.
You’re probably wondering what it’s like to be synesthetic?
This is a difficult question
as it is something that you don’t control, that you’re born with.
But we can play and have fun with it.
Personally, I think it’s a great wealth
to always be at the border between two frames:
the synesthetic one in which I think
and the words I’m trying to communicate with today.
To play with the frames, that means for example
not to brainstorm at the word level
but at the level of perceptions and sensations
that precede these words.
I’m willing to bet that the creators of Cleopatra glue,
which some of you here may remember,
thought a lot more about the almond smell of this glue
than its glue properties as such.
To play with frames is also not to feel compelled
by the way others will receive your message.
So, I wanted to write a poem
and to make a painting that illustrated the synesthetic vision
which gave rise to this poem.
I told a publisher who told me that he was not interested,
that what mattered was the text, the painting was irrelevant.
I talked to a gallerist who had the opposite reaction:
the painting is the most important, the text is irrelevant.
And then, after a first moment of discouragement,
I thought the most important was the message:
what was the form, what was the mode of expression,
adequate for this message?
So, if I try to make a poem
to express the emotion that my synesthesia gives me on a daily basis,
it could look like this:
the fire dismasted in the fury of sounds, pitched up like a sun,
the almond of reality with orphan constellations
dazzles the thought between non-existent vertigoes.
This is the poem that corresponds to the picture you have in front of you.
For me, both are linked and inseparable.
Now, poetry lovers will be more sensitive to poems or not,
painting enthusiasts will be more sensitive to painting or not,
but ultimately, it does not matter, because here stops
the adventure of my perception and yours begins.
(Applause)
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