To be born is not to come into the world. To be born is to come into life. - Michel Henry

Art opens us to a metaphysical knowledge of an entirely different nature (that 'objective' knowledge of the external world): it is a knowledge without object. Life in its ontological milieu, a life which embraces itself entirely without ever separating from itself and without been placed in front of itself like an object. We said that no path leads to life, except for life itself. One must stand within life in order to gain access to it: one must begin from life. Kandinsky just showed us the point of departure for painting -- it is an emotion, a more intense mode of life. The content of art is this emotion. The aim of art is to transmit it to others. The knowledge of art develops entirely within life; it is the proper movement of life, its movement of growth, of experiencing itself more strongly.

Here we may perceive the seriousness of the way in which the world’s truth undermines everything it makes seen, everything that it makes true. To the extent, then, that the truth is a placing outside, seizing everything to render it manifest, it actually casts the thing outside itself at every instant. This putting-outside-itself by no means signifies a simple transfer of the thing from one place to another – as if, in such a displacement, it remained similar to itself, at most receiving this new property of showing itself. Rather, this coming-into-appearance in the “outside itself” of the world signifies that it is the thing itself that finds itself cast outside itself. It is fractured, broken, cleaved in two, stripped of its own reality – in such a way that, now deprived of that reality that was its own, emptied of its flesh, it is no longer outside itself, in the world's Image, but just its own skin, a simple image, in effect, a transparent film, a surface without thickness, a piece of naked externality offered to a gaze that slides over it without being able to penetrate into it or reach anything but empty appearance.

If communication takes place between the artwork and the public, it is on the level of sensibility, through the emotions and their immanent modifications. It does not have anything to do with words, with collective, ideological or scientific representations, or with their critical, intellectual or literary formulations, in short, anything that is called culture. It is totally independent from that type of culture. This is why it is addressed to the group of people who ‘lack culture’. It is popular in the sense that it leads to what is most essential in each human being: one’s capacity to feel, to suffer and to love.