Bref aperçu de Guillaume Bottazzi – Brief overview Artworks

Journaliste, Delphine Freyssinet

The Surrealism of neurobiologist Jean-Pol Tassin

Jean-Pol Tassin, neurobiologist, director of research at Inserm and addictologist, has written “L’inconscient aux commandes” (“The unconscious in control”). In one of his lectures, he explains that “there are two modes in our brain, an analog mode and a cognitive mode. The cognitive mode is slow, acting on neuromodulators or neurotransmitters that are dependent on affectivity.”

I note in his representation of the individual that there are no purely objective thoughts in man, since the cognitive mode depends on our affectivity.

“These may be behavior-regulating systems, or those that produce serotonin and dopamine, for example. Our dreams actually last only a few seconds, and it’s a phase that processes our information analogically, even if we find it hard to believe. Our analogical system is a regression. A lot of people talk about dreams and say all kinds of nonsense. Analogical processing is the absorption, in a few milliseconds, of elements which impact our brain and which will serve as a reference to impact us later. A child, for example, operates in analog mode; he has no cognitive mode. This means they can walk without knowing how. We have neurotransmitters such as neuro adrenalin, which wakes us up, serotonin, which protects us, and dopamine, which ultimately decides on the hierarchy of structures, so that the behavioral response is adapted to our behavior. So dopamine is not just for the reward circuit. Its modulators are in the extreme minority – 500,000 out of 3 billion – and yet these neurotransmitters are responsible for our modulation and regulation, and therefore have an extremely important psychological effect. Depression, for example, is a depletion of dopamine- and serotonin-regulating neurons. Antidepressants enable these neurons to rest and return to a normal state. When we fall asleep, the regulators gradually shut down during REM sleep, so that cognitive processing is no longer possible, because the modulators have shut down. And it’s important that they are stopped, because they are extremely fragile and need to recover and rest. The brain works all night in analogy, but because they’re fragile, they can’t stop for more than twenty to thirty minutes. So, on average, we wake up a dozen times a night. When the modulators restart, they trigger cognitive functioning, and what happens is that you’re in a state of analogy, so you have no perception of what’s going on. Physiologically, there’s a modulator reactivation, and between the time you wake up and go back to sleep, you may or may not have a dream. This dream will last from 500 milliseconds to one second to three seconds. This dream doesn’t take place during sleep, but during micro-awakenings.”

To summarize neurobiologist Jean-Pol Tassin’s point of view, analogy is our unconscious. It reveals our affections and our links to a specific lived environment. It shows the unfiltered and unbounded being, and this implies that for him the work of art is a surrealist act that reveals our deepest truth named the unconscious.

The work of art is not Surrealistic

I had a dream last night that I remember; it intertwines my experiences and my feelings, it exacerbates my fears and this mixed with real situations as described by Jean-Pol Tassin.

I’ve never dreamt abstractly, and I don’t paint figurative works. There’s no sleepiness, no onirism, no aesthetic lightness in my dreams, precisely the kind I find in my creations. There’s no link with an approach to form, the atmospheric quality of images or their aesthetic interpretations. There are no dreams that go in the direction of my imagination, and I feel more inspired by observing a landscape than by my dreams, which don’t inspire me at all. Gaston Bachelard’s imaginary is prior to thought and feeling, an imaginary that is a reconstruction and not something sudden. This imaginary allows us to appropriate spaces, to find ourselves in tune with our history, to recreate ourselves confronted with the unreality of images, to rebuild and renew ourselves. This imaginary world takes shape in our waking hours. It is the fruit of conscious and unconscious reconstruction.

In my opinion, the imaginary is beautiful and stems from a creative act. It’s an act of sublimation as described by Sigmund Freud. It’s the transformation of energies that come from the outside and the inside, it’s the reconstruction of an integrated being trying to surpass itself.

“Everyone has thought that sleep is of the brain, by the brain and for the brain. We neglect the fact that we’re not brains, we’re mechanisms, we’re integrated, everything we do is integrated with everything else,” explains neuroscientist Paul Shaw of Washington University in St. Louis.

Imagination is a mental thing, the fruit of reconstruction, a reinvented universe that helps us to live better and to elevate ourselves. It stimulates us through sensory experiences and creates an aesthetic-cognitive activity. An experiment on mice entitled “…” demonstrated that by enriching their environments and promoting sensory stimulation, their cognitive abilities increased by four percent in fifteen days. The need to feed our imaginations, not our dreams, seems incontrovertible.

Guillaume Bottazzi

Inspired by the imperial villa of Katsura in Japan. This light, evanescent painting adjoins several hectares of wildlife.

here’s a demonstration

Japanese crane on a pine branch by Ohara Koson, 1900-30
Japanese woodblock print in colour

White is often used as an example to explain how a color can be received differently; it is the color of the dead in China and Japan and the color of wedding dresses in Western and Christian cultures. So, it’s true that these contextual and cultural factors come into play in our prism, but counterexamples don’t rule out the biology of our systems. In Japan, white can also be received differently. For example, walls that are frequently white are much appreciated and there is a fascination with white cranes. In the Land of the Rising Sun, the Japanese crane symbolizes peace, luck and longevity. This sacred animal is also associated with fidelity and wisdom. Many beliefs and superstitions stem from this bird of good fortune known as Tsuru. It is said that a crane can live for 1,000 years, and that a pair of cranes will ensure a happy marriage.

Guillaume Bottazzi – April 2025