Obliqua Oratio — what was said never reaches us entirely intact

The voice that reaches us from elsewhere

Something shifts between a spoken word and the account we later give of it. The words may remain unchanged, yet their place, time and force are no longer the same. Another voice takes them up and, in transmitting them, places them within a different experience.

Obliqua Oratio inhabits this interval.

The title comes from Latin grammar. Oratio recta presents speech as a direct quotation. Oratio obliqua, or indirect speech, incorporates it into the sentence of the person reporting it. In passing from one form to the other, pronouns, verb tenses and deictic markers are reorganised. The original speaker’s “I” may become “she” or “he”; “here” and “now” must be understood from another place and another moment.

The difference is therefore more than formal. In direct speech, a quotation is presented as a distinct fragment attributed to its original voice. In indirect speech, the reported content depends grammatically and enunciatively on the present speaker, who no longer merely reproduces a sentence but assumes responsibility for it within a new discourse.

Every reported utterance therefore establishes a relation between two perspectives: that of the person whose words or thoughts are being reported, and that of the person reporting them. The perspectives may draw close, but they do not coincide.

Oratio obliqua is neither a defective copy nor a weakened version of direct speech. It is an act of transmission.

Representing a representation

In Oratio Obliqua, Oratio Recta: An Essay on Metarepresentation, François Recanati examines reported discourse as a form of metarepresentation. The term denotes a representation that takes another representation as its object.

To report a statement, attribute a belief or comment on an image is not only to refer to what the statement, belief or image concerns. It is also to refer to the way another person has expressed, conceived or represented it.

If I say that a woman remembers a garden, my sentence concerns both the garden and her memory of it. If I report a witness’s words, I am not describing the event directly; I am presenting the witness’s representation of it. Two levels are involved, and they must remain distinct.

This distinction matters. To confuse an event with its account would erase the standpoint, memory and circumstances from which the account arose. Yet to attend only to mediation would make its object disappear. Metarepresentation holds both dimensions together without identifying them.

Indirect speech makes this structure particularly clear. An earlier utterance remains recognisable, but it is now embedded in a new sentence. Its transmission depends on another context and on another speaker’s responsibility.

A collection shaped by transmission

The works in Obliqua Oratio begin with images, historical figures, philosophical concepts and experiences that have already been narrated and interpreted. They do not claim to recover an untouched origin. Such an origin is often no longer available.

Marie Antoinette, for example, cannot now be separated from the official portraits, testimonies, pamphlets, trial records and later narratives that shaped her public image. Between the woman who lived and the historical figure we know lies an accumulation of discourse.

Dauphine therefore does not seek a definitive likeness. The painting works within this distance. The face, colours, signs of rank and floral fragments belong to a memory already transformed by history. Painting does not pretend to overcome mediation and restore a pure presence. It makes that mediation visible and submits it to renewed attention.

The same principle runs through the collection. Each work takes up something that precedes it, but no such act is neutral. Here, painting means recognising that transmission always selects, shifts and recomposes.

Language is not external to what it recounts

Words do not simply record realities that remain unchanged outside them. A description selects certain features and leaves out others. A narrative establishes relations among events, gives them an order and may assign them a cause. A name can preserve a memory, but it can also confine a person within an interpretation constructed by others.

This does not mean that language arbitrarily creates reality. An event resists the story told about it. Yet it becomes intelligible and communicable only through forms of language that organise it from a particular standpoint.

Gaetano Piccolo’s reflection on “facts of speech” allows language to be considered as a situated activity. Speaking is not simply a matter of producing grammatically correct statements. An utterance is addressed by someone, in particular circumstances, to someone else. It entails an intention, a relationship and a responsibility.

Indirect speech makes this dimension especially clear. Reporting an utterance involves deciding how to introduce it, which verb to use, which circumstances to recall and what distance to establish from it. To say that a person “states”, “supposes”, “claims” or “acknowledges” creates a different interpretative frame in each case.

The reported voice does not disappear, but it no longer speaks alone.

Memory does not reproduce the past

Memory is not an exact copy stored intact within the mind. Remembering entails reconstructing an episode from traces reactivated in the present. A person’s emotional state, knowledge acquired since the event and later accounts may all affect that reconstruction.

It would nevertheless be wrong to conclude that every memory is false. A reconstruction may remain faithful to essential aspects of the past. But this fidelity is not that of a mechanical recording. It requires recognition, comparison and sometimes correction.

Collective memory presents a related difficulty. Historical events reach us through documents, images, institutions and competing narratives. These mediations are not interchangeable. Some rest on verifiable testimony; others on propaganda, legend or organised forgetting.

The oblique does not release us from the search for truth. On the contrary, it requires us to examine the routes by which something has reached us.

In Obliqua Oratio, painting does not treat every interpretation as an equivalent truth. It makes perceptible the distance between a life and the narratives that have covered it over. In doing so, it may reopen what a familiar representation had closed.

Painting does not speak as language does

To compare painting with indirect speech is not to claim that a painted form can be translated word for word into a proposition. A colour does not report a sentence, and a line does not possess a grammatical function in itself.

The analogy concerns the structure of mediation.

Like reported speech, an image presents something that is not immediately present. It does so from another place, in another material and from another perspective. Painting does not restore an event, a person or an idea to an original state. It gives them a new form of appearance.

This form is not arbitrary. It results from concrete decisions: framing, the intensity of a colour, the omission of a detail, the superimposition of figures or the interruption of a contour. Each decision alters what can become visible.

The painting Obliqua Oratio enacts this transformation. Its white masses may suggest petals, wings or folds of fabric without yielding to a single identification. Dark lines cross these forms and prevent them from becoming isolated. The eye does not receive a perfectly constituted figure; it follows the relations through which a figure emerges.

The painting does not conceal an object waiting to be discovered. It sustains several possible readings within one visual organisation.

Ambiguity and perception

Visual ambiguity should not be confused with imprecision. A work may be rigorously composed while allowing more than one identification. Open contours, overlaps and contrasts offer cues that do not immediately converge on a single interpretation.

Some contemporary models describe perception as a process in which sensory information is tested against expectations formed through experience. This does not mean that the brain freely invents what it sees. Perceptual hypotheses remain constrained by the actual features of the image.

Faced with an ambiguous figure, the viewer may move between several organisations compatible with the same visual information. The gaze returns to particular areas, changes its route and reassesses what it had seemed to recognise. The work does not conceal a coded message; it keeps the search for a coherent configuration active.

This perceptual activity illuminates the experience proposed by the collection. The viewer is not asked to uncover a single meaning fixed in advance. Yet interpretation remains answerable to the work. Not every reading is equally convincing: some respect the relations present in the image, while others impose a narrative without visual support.

Openness of meaning is not the absence of criteria.

The trace of the gesture

A brushstroke is not the gesture itself but its visible result. Its direction, thickness, interruptions and material density may nevertheless allow certain aspects of the movement that produced it to be inferred.

We do not see the hand at work, but we can follow its trace.

In this precise sense, painting may be compared with indirect speech. The past action is no longer present; it remains accessible through a form that conveys it without repeating it. Painted matter retains a rhythm, a pressure and sometimes a hesitation.

The trace does not provide complete access to the artist’s inner life. It cannot establish an emotion or psychological intention with certainty. It shows only that an action occurred and left a perceptible organisation behind.

This distinction is important. To interpret a work is not to invent its maker’s state of mind. It is to observe how a gesture, once it has become a trace, participates in the construction of the image.

Truth approached obliquely

The oblique is neither the opposite of truth nor a guarantee of it. Indirect speech may be faithful, inaccurate or deceptive. Memory may preserve an event or distort it. An image may deepen an experience, but it may also simplify it.

The value of the oblique lies elsewhere: it makes mediation perceptible.

It reminds us that reported speech depends on a voice that takes it up, that a memory is reconstructed in the present, and that a historical figure reaches us through successive representations. It prevents us from confusing transmission with immediate access to an origin.

Painting can then perform a critical and reparative act. It is critical because it unsettles images that have become too certain of themselves. It is reparative not because it cancels loss or miraculously restores the past, but because it returns complexity to what had been reduced to a single version.

It cannot return an absent voice to its first presence. It can make that voice audible otherwise.

Obliqua Oratio names this passage. Something has been said, lived or seen. A distance separates us from it. Between the withdrawn origin and the present act of looking, the work does not erase that distance; it gives it form.

The truth that emerges is not frontal. It is built through attention to traces, differences and transformations. It does not promise possession of meaning. It makes its examination possible once again.