The colour of the revolution. Sarduy, Robbe-Grillet and May 1968.

Abstract

This work explores the way in which Severo Sarduy (1937-1993) and Alain RobbeGrillet (1922-2008) problematize the tense and renewed relationship between text and image and, more precisely, between text and color. Both authors propose -in our hypothesis- a new form of representation of the aesthetic and the political, from the confluence, in the same movement, of attraction and suspicion, around the May 1968. Likewise, putting into dialogue the work of the two artists allows us to challenge the modern discourse of purity and formal concentration of materials, in pursuit of practices that make of the mixture, the crosses, the dialogues, the distances and the disagreements between the arts the very material of thought. Hence, the reflection on the color "red" acquires in both a disturbing dimension: the advent of "evil" (Bataille, 1957), as excess, embodied in figures that seem to challenge and criticize, through the same setting narrative scene, the traditional political ratio.