166FOLLOWING MATERIALITYwork, Cézanne’s constitutes a new rupture in the production of painting
as agency-imbued object in the modern age.
Cézanne’s groundbreaking idea was that of producing “a trompe-l’oeil
married to the laws of the medium”: a vision in which paint could be re-
vealed in its material qualities (and not made to wholly disappear into the
resemblance of other materials) and where the canvas ceased to be an ob-
jective mirror of the world.^7 In fact, Cézanne’s more definite innovation
lay in the problematization of the physical and implied mobilization of the
(painter’s and) viewer’s body: in front of a still-life painting by Cézanne,
and similarly to the condition prescribed by Roni Horn’s diptychs, the
viewer is not locked into the anthropocentric viewpoint of classical per-
spective, but is engaged in an active act of embodied negotiation.
Producing nonaffirmative paintings was for Cézanne a matter of drasti-
cally reconfiguring classical tradition. It was therefore plates, draperies,
vases, coffeepots, bottles, statues (of human bodies), and tables that in their
mundane, absolute stillness enabled Cézanne’s gaze to construct the new
spatializations of multifocal perspective. The frequent inclusion of apples,
oranges, and onions as natural elements subsisted only as far as it provided
the artist with the archetypal spherical forms of geometry he required to
problematize his formalist vocabulary (fig. 5.2). It is this process of geome-
trization of the everyday object that Braque and Picasso problematized in
their own still-life paintings, laying the foundation for cubism.^8
Merleau-Ponty conceives Cézanne’s multifocal perspective as that
which phenomenologically gestures toward a prescientific possibility of
relating to nature.^9 In this context, the artist’s vision emerges as a non-
classical, nonpositivistic mediation between body and objects. But from
this perspective, the persistent absence of animals in Cézanne’s v ision re-
mains symptomatic of an overarching, anthropocentric approach. The
artist’s project, that of simultaneously attempting to transcend the uni-
fying, illusional affirmation of quattrocento painting, does not equate to
abandoning anthropocentrism itself. Consequently, when Cézanne re-
portedly claims to be “attempting a piece of nature,” he would be more
appropriately understood to be “attempting a piece of [human] nature.”
As T. J. Clark notices, in Cézanne’s work, “the world has to be pictured as
possessed by the eye, indeed totalized by it; but always on the basis of
exploding or garbled or utterly intractable data—data that speak to the
impossibility of synthesis even as they seem to provide the sensuous ma-