Apeiron: Next to Nothing, Filled with Residue
On perception, residue, and the becoming of an image
Painting and drawing do not begin with an image already formed. They begin before the image: in colour, light, pressure, distance, bodily orientation, and the uncertain relations through which the world first becomes available to a perceiving body. Yet this beginning is not a simple present. It is not a small moment that can be held, stored, and later recovered. It is a field—open, unstable, and filled with residue.
I call this field Apeiron.
The drawing of a reclining figure offers one way of approaching it. The model is recognisable, yet the figure is not entirely settled. Lines search for the body's contours; colour moves across the hair and limbs; areas of grey paper remain active between the marks. Some passages establish the figure, while others leave it uncertain. The drawing does not simply describe a body that has already been understood. It shows a body becoming an image through the uncertain encounter between perception and the hand.
Apeiron names the field in which this becoming takes place.
Next to Nothing
Apeiron is next to nothing. It has no fixed image, no definite contour, no completed composition, and no measurable duration. It is not a mental picture waiting to be transferred onto paper or canvas. Nor is it an empty space. It is a near-nothing: a field without settled form, but not without content.
In this field, experience has not yet become a thing. Colour has not yet become local colour. A contour has not yet become an outline. Texture has not yet become surface. The world has entered perception, but it has not yet been fixed as an object to be copied.
In the drawing, the figure seems to hover between these conditions. Its body is present, but its boundaries are not everywhere secure. The grey paper is not merely a background against which the figure appears. It participates in the image, holding spaces that have not been fully occupied by line or colour. The drawing moves between what is established and what remains open.
This near-nothingness is not absence. It is openness. Something is there, but it has not yet decided what it is.
The paper makes this openness visible. It allows the image to emerge without requiring every part of the figure to be described. The body becomes present through a relationship between marks and the spaces that remain unmarked.
Filled with Residue
Although Apeiron is next to nothing, it is filled with residue.
Residue is not simply what remains after an experience has ended. It is not a stored image of something once seen. It is the altered availability of experience: a colour pressure, a bodily inclination, an uncertain density, a remembered intensity, a relation that has not yet found form.
Residue has no clear boundary. It may come from the immediate motif, but it also carries the sediment of a life of seeing: other paintings, other drawings, other bodies, other rooms, other kinds of light. It is personal without being merely private. It is sensory without being simply optical. It is memory without being a recoverable past.
Residue is not only what an encounter leaves behind; it is what continues to condition the possibility of another encounter.
In the drawing, the orange of the hair and the yellow passages across the body do more than identify local colours. They establish intensities. They pull the figure forward, interrupt its grey structure, and create relationships that are partly independent of anatomical description. The dark lines do not simply enclose the body; they gather, disperse, and return. Colour and contour become ways of organising the felt presence of the figure.
These marks may arise from what is seen, but they are not reducible to the visible properties of the model. They are also shaped by the body's response to looking, by the artist's previous encounters with colour and form, and by the possibilities offered by the materials.
Residue does not dictate the drawing. It makes certain movements possible.
Its contents are not all available to conscious understanding at once. A colour may be placed before its function becomes clear. A line may be repeated because the form remains uncertain. A passage that initially appears incidental may become essential to the drawing's overall movement. Some relations become visible only after other marks have been made.
The image emerges not because residue has been fully understood, but because it has been allowed to act.
Time Is Not the Ground
I do not believe that we are born with time as a system of measured intervals. Clock time, sequence, and the division of experience into separate moments are ways of organising what is originally a living field. We learn to call one thing before and another after. We learn to measure duration. But experience itself may not begin as a line of isolated instants.
A sensation is not a moment that can be isolated, preserved, and retrieved later. Even the most immediate experience is already layered. It carries what has just passed within it and opens towards what has not yet arrived. More importantly, it is saturated with everything the body has already lived.
For this reason, I do not understand perception primarily as the recovery of a temporal event. I understand it as a spatial and residual field. What is called memory is not a return to an original moment. It is residue becoming active again under new conditions.
There is no original sensation waiting intact behind the residue. There is only experience becoming residue, and residue becoming experience again.
The drawing makes this distinction important. Although it depicts a particular pose, its significance does not depend on reconstructing the exact instant in which the model was seen. The marks do not need to preserve that instant. They establish relationships in the present of the drawing: between the figure and the paper, one contour and another, a patch of colour and the grey around it.
The drawing is not a container for a vanished moment. It is a new field in which the experience of the model has been transformed.
The First Delay
The first delay begins when the external world meets the perceiving body. Light enters the eye, but the world does not simply enter awareness as a copy. Perception is selective, bodily, and relational. It is shaped by attention, movement, position, fatigue, memory, and the conditions of seeing.
The motif begins to lose its immediate tangibility. It does not disappear, but it is no longer simply an external object. It becomes part of an internal field of possibility.
This is the movement into Apeiron.
The first delay is not merely a gap between seeing and knowing. It is the transformation of the world into residue. The motif remains present, but its authority changes. It becomes a trigger rather than a template.
In the seated figure, this transformation can be approached through the difference between the model's body and the body's appearance in the drawing. The model has a physical continuity that the drawing cannot reproduce in its entirety. The drawing selects, compresses, exaggerates, omits, and reorganises. It gives some relationships greater emphasis than others.
The body is not transferred intact from the model to the paper. It is encountered through a perceiving body and becomes available in a different form.
This difference is not a failure of observation. It is the condition under which drawing becomes possible.
The Second Delay
The second delay begins when residue enters making.
Residue is not transferred onto the surface. It encounters the hand, the body, the material, and the resistance of paper, panel, pigment, or pencil. A line is not the record of a completed perception. It is an action that changes the conditions of perception.
A mark may clarify a form, but it may also disturb one. A patch of colour may establish a relation that was not previously apparent. An erasure may open a space that neither the motif nor the earlier mark had suggested. The material does not simply reproduce a perceptual quality; it establishes a new one.
In the drawing, the contours of the figure are not uniformly decisive. Some are reinforced, some remain broken, and others appear to search for a boundary. The dark lines gather around the body, while the coloured passages move through it without always conforming to its outline. The result is not a single, continuous description but a field of different degrees of certainty.
These differences matter. They show how the drawing can hold together what has been established and what remains unresolved.
The hand does not simply obey what perception has already determined. Through material action, it discovers possibilities that could not have been fully anticipated.
Texture makes this especially clear. The texture of a drawn surface is not copied from the texture of the motif. It emerges through action: pigment dragged, pencil pressed, lines layered, and marks broken against the resistance of paper. Perception may intimate texture, but the studio realises it in space.
The second delay is therefore not a secondary stage in which an already completed perception is executed. It is another beginning. The residue enters the material, but the material changes what that residue can become.
The Recursive Field
The two delays are not separate stages. They form a recursive movement.
Perception becomes residue. Residue enters making. Making produces a mark. The mark becomes a new perceptual event. That event changes the field. The changed field affects the next action.
Painting and drawing therefore do not execute an image already determined in the mind. They allow perception to continue through material action. The work is not the end of perception. It is one of the ways perception continues.
In the seated figure, a line that establishes the torso also changes how the surrounding arm is perceived. A patch of orange changes the visual weight of the head. A dark passage at the hip alters the relation between the torso and the bent legs. The new mark does not merely add information to an existing image; it changes the conditions under which the rest of the image is seen.
The drawing develops through these reciprocal adjustments. Each mark enters a field already altered by the marks before it. Each new perception arises within a situation that the act of drawing itself has helped to produce.
The process does not simply repeat itself. Each return takes place under different conditions. The field has changed, the material has changed, and the artist's possibilities have changed with them.
This is why drawing cannot be understood only as the representation of what was seen. It is a material event in which seeing is altered by its own consequences.
The Work as Trace
A finished work does not prove that an original sensation has been recovered. It cannot do that. What it can do is make visible the transformation of sensation into residue, and residue into material form.
In a drawing, a searching contour may show that form was never simply given. Unstable colour relations may show that colour was never merely local. A broken mark or an unresolved passage may show that making is not obedience to a prior image but a continuing negotiation with perception.
The reclining figure preserves something of this negotiation. Its contours do not all settle into a definitive boundary. Its colours do not simply fill predetermined shapes. Its visible construction allows the viewer to encounter the figure as both a body and an arrangement of marks.
The drawing is therefore more than a record of a model. It is a trace of the encounter between the model, the artist's accumulated experience, the hand, and the material surface.
This does not mean that every visible mark necessarily records a particular hesitation or decision. The drawing cannot disclose the entire history of its making. Its significance lies instead in the way its present structure allows uncertainty, emphasis, and revision to remain active within the image.
The work does not return us to the original encounter. It makes a new encounter possible.
Originality in the Near-Nothing
Originality does not come from rejecting history, skill, memory, or influence. Nor does it come from trying to see more accurately. It comes from allowing residue to become form without forcing it prematurely into a known image.
The interval of Apeiron is important because nothing there is yet fixed. But nothing there is empty either. It is filled with the pressure of a life of sensory experience. The artist does not escape this pressure. The artist works within it.
When residue enters the hand and the surface, something appears that could not have been fully predicted. The artist acts, perceives the consequence, and acts again. Originality develops through this continuing transformation, not through the deliberate pursuit of novelty.
The drawing's particular character lies in the relationships it establishes between its marks: the contrast of orange against grey, the movement between dark contour and open paper, the uneven resolution of the figure, and the interplay between bodily recognition and graphic construction. These qualities need not have been fully conceived before the drawing began. They become possible through the act of making.
What emerges is not entirely unknown, because it carries the residue of experience. Nor is it entirely known in advance, because its form has yet to be realised.
Originality lies in this movement between what is already present and what has not yet become possible.
Painting and Drawing from the Inside Out
Painting and drawing begin in the world, but they do not remain simply in the world. The motif enters from outside, yet its subsequent life is negotiated within the changing field of perception, residue, body, and material.
This is what I mean by working from the inside out.
The task is not to escape theory, history, memory, or influence. It is to prevent them from arriving before perception has had the chance to transform the encounter with the world, and before the hand has had the chance to realise that transformation in space.
The drawing of the seated figure offers no final definition of Apeiron. Instead, it gives the concept a material presence. The grey paper, the searching contours, the orange hair, the yellow accents, and the unresolved passages are not illustrations of a philosophical proposition added after the event. They are the very conditions through which the proposition can be explored.
The drawing allows us to see how a figure may become present without being completely fixed, how a mark may carry the pressure of experience without reproducing an original sensation, and how the act of making may generate relations that were not available beforehand.
Apeiron is not a fixed definition that can be exhausted in a single account. Each further investigation may extend its meaning, reveal new relations, or open questions that were not previously visible. We cannot know everything at once. Some possibilities become available only through the act of looking, thinking, and making.
Perhaps this is also part of the nature of Apeiron: not simply a field in which images have yet to take form, but a field whose possibilities exceed what can be known at any one time.
Apeiron is next to nothing. But it is filled with residue.
And from that near-nothing, painting and drawing allow experience to become form again.
日本語訳（完全版）
ピーター・デイヴィッドソン 《赤髪のモデルの習作》 鉛筆、パステル／グレーのパステル紙（A4程度）
アペイロン：ほとんど無に近く、しかし残滓で満たされた場
知覚・残滓・イメージの生成について
絵画や素描は、すでに形成されたイメージから始まるのではない。 それらはイメージの前から始まる。 色、光、圧、距離、身体の向き、そして世界が最初に身体へと立ち上がる際の不確かな諸関係の中で始まる。
しかし、この始まりは単純な「現在」ではない。 保持され、蓄えられ、後から取り出せるような小さな瞬間ではない。 それは開かれ、揺らぎ、そして残滓で満たされた「場」である。
私はこの場を アペイロン（Apeiron） と呼ぶ。
モデルの素描が示すもの
横たわる人物の素描は、この場へ近づく一つの方法を示している。 モデルは認識可能だが、姿は完全には定まっていない。 線は身体の輪郭を探り、色は髪や四肢を横断し、グレーの紙の地は線や色の間でなお活動している。 ある部分は身体を確立し、別の部分は不確かなまま残る。
この素描は、すでに理解された身体を記述しているのではない。 知覚と手の不確かな出会いの中で、身体がイメージへと「なりつつある」ことを示している。
アペイロンとは、この「生成」が起こる場の名前である。
ほとんど無に近い場
アペイロンは「ほとんど無」に近い。 確定したイメージも、輪郭も、完成した構図も、測定可能な持続も持たない。 紙やキャンバスへ転写されるのを待つ心的イメージでもない。 しかし空虚でもない。
それは「ほぼ無」でありながら、内容を欠いてはいない場である。
この場では、経験はまだ「もの」になっていない。 色はまだ「局所的な色」になっておらず、輪郭はまだ「アウトライン」になっていない。 世界は知覚へと入り込んでいるが、まだ「写すべき対象」として固定されていない。
素描の中で、身体はまさにこの状態の間に浮遊している。 身体は存在するが、その境界はどこでも確かなわけではない。 紙の地は背景ではなく、イメージの一部として働き、線や色が占めていない空間を保持している。
この「ほぼ無」は欠如ではない。 それは開かれた状態である。 何かがそこにあるが、まだ「何であるか」を決めていない。
残滓で満たされた場
アペイロンは「ほぼ無」であるにもかかわらず、残滓で満たされている。
残滓とは、経験が終わった後に残る単なる痕跡ではない。 かつて見たイメージの保存でもない。 それは経験の「利用可能性の変化」である。 色の圧、身体の傾き、不確かな密度、記憶された強度、まだ形を得ていない関係。
残滓には明確な境界がない。 目の前のモチーフから来ることもあれば、長い視覚経験の堆積から来ることもある。 他の絵画、他の素描、他の身体、他の部屋、他の光。 個人的でありながら、単なる私的領域ではない。 感覚的でありながら、単なる光学的現象ではない。 記憶でありながら、取り戻せる過去ではない。
残滓は静かに座しているのではない。 押し、引き、ためらい、示唆する。 絵を決定するのではなく、ある動きを可能にする。
素描のオレンジの髪や黄色の身体のパッセージは、局所色を示す以上の働きをしている。 それらは強度を作り、身体を前へ引き出し、グレーの構造を中断し、解剖学的記述とは部分的に独立した関係を生み出す。
線もまた、身体を囲うだけではない。 集まり、散り、戻る。 色と輪郭は、身体の「感じられる存在」を組織する方法となる。
時間は基盤ではない
私は、私たちが「時間」という測定体系を生まれながらに持っているとは考えない。 経験は本来、区切られた瞬間の連続として始まるのではない。
最も即時的な感覚でさえ、すでに層を成している。 直前のものを含み、まだ到来していないものへ開かれ、そして身体が生きてきたすべてを帯びている。
だから私は知覚を「時間的な出来事の回収」としてではなく、 「空間的・残滓的な場」として理解する。
記憶とは、元の瞬間への回帰ではない。 残滓が新しい条件のもとで再び活動することである。
第一の遅延
外界が身体に出会うとき、第一の遅延が始まる。 光は眼に入るが、世界はそのまま意識にコピーされるわけではない。 知覚は選択的で、身体的で、関係的である。
モチーフは即時的な触知性を失い始める。 消えるわけではないが、単なる外的対象ではなくなる。 可能性の場の一部となる。
これがアペイロンへの移行である。
第二の遅延
第二の遅延は、残滓が制作へと入るときに始まる。
残滓はそのまま紙へ転写されるのではない。 手、身体、素材、紙の抵抗と出会う。
線は完成した知覚の記録ではない。 知覚の条件を変える行為である。
色のパッチは新しい関係を生み、消去は予期されなかった空間を開く。 素材は知覚を再現するのではなく、新しい知覚を成立させる。
再帰的な場
第一の遅延 → 残滓 残滓 → 制作 制作 → 新しい知覚 新しい知覚 → 場の変化 場の変化 → 次の行為
この循環が絵を生む。
素描は、見たものの再現ではない。 見ることが自らの結果によって変えられていく「物質的な出来事」である。
痕跡としての作品
完成した作品は、元の感覚を回復した証拠ではない。 感覚が残滓へ、残滓が物質へと変わる過程を可視化する。
身体の輪郭は与えられていたのではなく、探られていたことを示す。 色の不安定な関係は、色が単なる局所色ではなかったことを示す。 未解決のパッセージは、制作が「既存のイメージへの服従」ではないことを示す。
作品は過去への回帰ではなく、新しい遭遇を可能にする。
内側から描くこと
絵画や素描は世界から始まるが、世界に留まるわけではない。 モチーフは外から入るが、その後の生命は知覚・残滓・身体・素材の内側で交渉される。
これが「内側から描く」という意味である。
アペイロンは一度の説明で尽きる概念ではない。 見ること、考えること、描くことによって、その意味は拡張され続ける。
アペイロンはほとんど無に近い。 しかし残滓で満たされている。
そしてその「ほぼ無」から、絵画と素描は再び経験を形へと変える。
