[Blancage] - Entry No. 03 — MY Bear, or What I Look At Is Already Looked At by the Other

Concarneau - Blancage n°03 - MY bear— (c) Fabrice Laudrin 2025

[French]

MY Bear

Pont-Aven, 2025

Blancage over an non-readable tag (30 cm)

Description

Rectangular Blancage block (30 × 30 cm), applied roughly 50 cm above ground level on the façade of a residential building, in a narrow alleyway.The repainted surface shows three lighter areas and two darker ones, forming a tripartite configuration that, unintentionally, evokes the outline of an animal figure.During the systematic photographic survey, a child passing by with her parents spontaneously identified the configuration:

‘Oh Mum, it looks like my bear!’

This reaction constitutes the first orally documented on-site interpretation.I had neither seen nor read this figure before the child named it.

Erased : non-readable tag

Here, the municipal Blancage performs a standardized act of overpainting, intended to neutralise a prior, unidentified inscription.

The applied layer remains uneven: halos, shifts in density, irregular edges.

These material qualities—entirely involuntary—generate a proto-figuration.

Thus, the gesture meant to erase the trace produces a second trace, distinct from the original yet carrying its own autonomous figurative potential.

Remaining : Nothing — Blancage fully effective.

Analysis

From a Lacanian perspective, Blancage operates as a symbolic act intended to restore a neutral surface.Yet subjective perception reintroduces a signifier: the child mobilises an imaginary schema (‘MY bear’) to organise what is seen in the real.The possessive marks a symbolic appropriation: the figure appears because a subject names it.

Conversely, the repainted surface may itself be considered generative: the material, through its discontinuities, produces a latent form of its own. Blancage does not suppress; it configures. In this view, the child’s reading would not be a projection, but a response to a figurative call already lodged in the limewash.

These two readings — symbolic and spectral — coexist without cancelling one another.

Problematic

Are we standing before a language — or before a transcultural spirit?

The figural emergence observed here questions the very nature of the dispositif:

does it arise from a linguistic effect, through the activation of a pre-existing signifier (‘MY bear’) within the child’s imaginary field?

or does it reveal a universal perceptual archetype — a transcultural tendency to recognise faces and animals within minimal configurations?

This piece thus raises the central question of the Effaced / Remained corpus:how does an operation of erasure, strictly functional in its intent, become either a surface for symbolic projection or an involuntary generator of forms?

Statut dans la collection

Catalogue : "Blancage"

.Section : Figures Born of Erasure

Number : 03

Titre interne : MON ours (MY Bear) (30 cm) 

Location : Pont-Aven, alleyway, residential wall

A posteriori : The Contaminated Imaginary

That same evening, I showed the original photograph to my sixteen-year-old daughter.Her response was immediate: ‘It looks like Grandma with her curlers!’A completely different schema from that of the little girl in the alley. Here she summons a lineage-based, intimate genealogy.And now, for me, it is impossible to see anything other than my mother-in-law.

For Lacan, we never see alone: the gaze of the Other precedes and organises our own.

What the Other sees — what the Other says they see — reshapes our very perception.A small child sees a bear; my daughter sees ‘Grandma with her curlers’; and I, from now on, can see nothing else.

It is not the stain that changes, but the imaginary that becomes colonised.Lacan puts it this way: ‘Man’s desire is the desire of the Other’ (Seminar XI), and again: ‘What I look at is already looked at by the Other.’

The contaminated imaginary is precisely this: when the image of the Other becomes our own, when our gaze ceases to be origin and becomes inheritance.

Jacques Lacan, Le Séminaire, Livre XI, Seuil, 1973, p. 235 → « Le désir de l’homme, c’est le désir de l’Autre. », (Man’s desire is the desire of the Other.)

Jacques Lacan, Le Séminaire, Livre XI, Seuil, 1973, p. 84 → « Ce que je regarde est toujours déjà regardé. », (What I look at is always already looked at.)