Created for the Avignon exhibition, Othoniel Cosmos or the Ghosts of Love, this is a sketchbook.

Jean-Michel Othoniel has filled it with watercolors that reveal the movement of hand and mind, the moment when brush, paint, and water stitch idea to gesture. Something is born, takes form, is elaborated; these drawings are apparitions.

Leaving out words would have been complicated: art and love bring life to language, at once source and estuary. To this end, the artist asked the writer Colin Lemoine to contribute sentences, to conjugate yesterdays and tomorrows in new ways, to elaborate a past anterior, the compound tense of lovers.

Its epigraph, borrowed from Petrarch, could be:

"Sorrow, why do you lead me
out of my way, to say what I would not?
Let me just go where I am pleased to go."