Synesthetic paragraph: the tool of painting

Written By Guido Balbo di Vinadio

[An excerpt from chapter four of Rhapsody in Resonance: on ways of bringing forth a regenerative vision]

The function of painting

Painting is not just used to assist the process reported above. It finds firstly a functional role. The painted picture can function as a map that embodies the concept that wants to be conveyed. I have been using this strategy throughout this paper in regards to the expression of the concept of “organs of self.” I offer here another example in the context of the designing process for a collective interdisciplinary project. To understand the organising structure, the form of the project, a picture of it gives a chance to visualise it collectively. It is not hot news here; architects know this very well when it comes to the structure of buildings. However, for our dear regenerative project, I suggest grounding ideas in the representation of the more-than-human fellows that so well embody the living principles of becoming, and that, emerging from the white paper, might even inspire insights with their age-old wisdom. 

In this instance, the painting above expresses what might be the fundamental structure of an interdisciplinary project. In thinking about this, the image came forth intuitively, it presented itself as a whole. When I go through the parts, I see how each reveals its own self-meanings in coherence to the whole. The planet is the people who decide to work together, at the heart of them is a shared intention that summons the gravitational force, the will that keeps everything together. Out of such a hold emerges the capacity for a set of diverse disciplines to grow in self-expression while remaining rooted in the planet, the common intention. Concurrently, the root system provides further resilience to the whole system. If I need to refer to the beginning of the project, I point to the centre of the planet, “What is the common intention, our set of values, that will hold everything together, and in which we all need to put roots in order to grow and be nourished?” In the first stages, discussing what shape one of the branches will take is counterproductive, or ‘maladaptive’, for it would not provide the necessary conditions for successive organic and holistic flourishing. 

The nature of painting

Through painting, concepts can find visual embodiment. Represented meanings are self-evident, appearing at once altogether on the paper. Painting exceeds the linearity of speech. Written letters exist simultaneously on a piece of paper, yet their meaning is only accessible through the linearity of discourse; their sense is rhythmic and melodic. Painting, on the other hand, is atemporal, self-evident, and harmonic. It translates meaning into something sustaining, like a never ending set of notes, a perpetual chord 1. The ability to express simultaneous meanings embedded in its nature, gives painting its essential phenomenological character. Philosopher Merleau-Ponty repeatedly visits, in his writings, Cézanne's pictorial practice as fertile ground for his phenomenological musings 23. 

Here linear understanding collapses into a moment outside time altogether. Or rather, it falls in the depths of time, where meaning is harmonic. Panting allows a kind of revelation in full sight. It is things spoken. It speaks the magical language of things 4, and similarly that of plants 5, and clearly that of dreams 6. In other words, it speaks the poetic language of the world where “being that can be understood is language.”7 In this context the functionality of paintings thus slides into a deeper level of significance and effectiveness. Painting speaks the language the world understands. 

1 The organ mightily attempts to do so, the pipes and other 'diaphragmatic' instruments do allow this continuity; strings mock endlessness by a careful change of bow.

2 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, ‘Cézanne's Doubt’ in Sense and Non-Sense, tr. by Hubert L. Dreyfus and Patricial Allen Dreyfus, (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1964 [1948]), pp. 9-25.

3 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, ‘Eye and Mind’ in L’Œil et l’esprit, (Gallimard, 1961) trans. by Carleton Dallery in The Primacy of Perception, ed. by James Edie (Northwestern University Press, 1964), 159-190.

4 Kathrin Busch., ‘The Language of Things and the Magic of LanguageOn Walter Benjamin’s Concept of Latent Potency’, Transversal Text, trans. by Mary O’Neill, December 2006 <https://transversal.at/transversal/0107/busch/en> [accessed 12 July 2024].

5 Michael Marder, Pant-Thinking: A Philosophy of Vegetal Life. (Columbia University Press, 2013)

6 Freya Mathews, ‘An Invitation to Ontopoetics: the Poetic Structure of Being’, Australian Humanities Review, <https://australianhumanitiesreview.org/2007/03/01/an-invitation-to-ontopoetics-the-poetic-structure-of-being/#_ednref5> [accessed 14 July 2024].

7 Gadamer cited in Henri Bortft,‘Counterfeit and authentic wholes: Finding a means for dwelling in nature’ in Dwelling, place and environment, ed. by David Seamon and Robert Mugerauer (Maftinus Nijhoft Publishers, 1985), pp. 281-302, (p. 299):
“Like Goethe's, Schad's way of science is phenomenological and hermeneutical. lt is phenomenological because the animal is capable of disclosing itself in terms of itself. Phenomenology, said Heidegger, is the effort “to let that which shows itself be seen from itself in the very way in which it shows itself from itself.” Phenomenology brings to light what is there but at first may be hidden. Schad discovers in the animal the qualities which make that animal what it is rather than some other creature. In addition, Schad's work is hermeneutical, since when the point is reached where the

animal discloses itself, the animal becomes its own language. In this moment, the animal is language. As an authentic discovery, this moment can only be experienced directly; it cannot be "translated" adequately into the verbal language of secondhand description. In this sense, Schad's way of seeing echoes the universal sense of Gadamer's hermeneutics, in which “being that can be understood is language.””


Guido Balbo di Vinadio

Guido was born in Rome and received a musical education from a young age, pursuing pre-academic studies in cello until his late teenage years. Alongside his musical training, he attended a scientific high school with a broad curriculum that encompassed subjects ranging from History, Science, and Philosophy to Literature (Italian, Latin, and English), Physics, and more—Religion being the only optional subject. However, it was the afternoon drawing and painting classes with an artist in Rome that ultimately led him to pursue a BA in Fine Arts and Mixed Media in London.

The course provided space for independent creative research, both artistic and intellectual. His inquiries naturally gravitated toward Ecology and Anthropology, eventually guiding him to Schumacher College, where he explored practices such as Permaculture and Agroforestry. There, he deepened his understanding of applied ecological principles, processes, and the diverse worldviews and cosmologies of both Western and non-Western traditions.

Guido's interdisciplinary upbringing—his mother, the daughter of a physicist, is an ecologist, while his father, the son of a philosopher, is an architect—has shaped his ability to approach the world with a well-informed and contextualized perspective. This background enables him to navigate different ways of thinking and expression with fluidity and depth.

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