" Tere is signification when we submit the data of the world to a "coherent deformation." That convergence of all the visible and intellectual vectors of the painting towards the same signification, X, is already sketched out in the painter's perception. It begins as soon as he perceives—that is, as soon as he arranges certain gaps or fissures, figures and grounds, a top and a bottom, a norm and a deviation in the inaccessible plenum of things. In other words, as soon as certain elements of the world take on the value of dimensions to which from then on we relate all the others and in whose language we express them. For each painter, style is the system of equivalences that he makes for himself for the work which manifests the world he sees. It is the universal index of the "coherent deformation" by which he concentrates the still scattered meaning of perception and makes it exist expressly. The work is not brought to fulfilment far from things and in some intimate laboratory to which the painter and the painter alone has the key. Whether he is looking at real flowers or paper flowers, he always goes back to his world, as if the principle of the equivalences by means of which he is going to manifest it had been buried there since the beginning of time. "
― Maurice Merleau-Ponty
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