Among all creative attitudes, there is one that invites us to go deeper: the desire to understand. It is not a thirst for control, nor a need to explain everything, but a sincere openness to what fascinates us and still escapes us.
This desire is like a question that never ends. It does not look for immediate answers or definitive conclusions. It is rather a movement that keeps us alive, a gaze that wants to enter a little further, to approach mystery with respect.
To create with this desire is to recognise that every work is also a form of searching. That behind a stroke, a gesture, a decision, there is always the will to better understand something: an emotion, a memory, a relationship with matter, or even with oneself.
The desire to understand is not impatient. It knows how to coexist with slowness, with silences, with diverging paths. Sometimes what it discovers is not what it was looking for, but that does not diminish its value. On the contrary: it is precisely in that detour where the unexpected field of creativity opens.
It is not a desire to possess knowledge, but to enter into dialogue with it. A form of humility that recognises there are things that cannot be fully grasped, yet are still worth approaching. Like reading the sea: knowing it will never be completely understood, but that each wave reveals part of its language.
In art, this desire is what makes us return again and again to the same form, the same colour, the same question. Not to repeat ourselves, but because we know that each approach opens a new window.
An example of this attitude can be found in the work of the Chinese painter Chu Ta (Bada Shanren) 1626-1705 (*). After losing everything with the fall of the Ming dynasty, his painting became a path of silent searching. His fish, birds and flowers, painted with simple strokes and surrounded by emptiness, do not seek to describe, but to understand what is essential and intangible. In his works there is mystery, irony, and a profound silence that does not offer answers but invites another way of seeing.
The desire to understand never ends. It is inexhaustible, because the world is inexhaustible. And perhaps what matters most is not to understand everything, but to dwell within this path, this search that never ends.
(*) There is a book by François Cheng about Chu Ta, Le génie du trait, published by Éditions Phébus. It is in French, and at the moment I don’t know if it has been translated into other languages.