Echoing Jean Dubuffet's idea that thought must arise from material in artistic practice, this essay reinterprets a moment in the history of twentieth-century art through stone, sand, earth and dust. The mineral serves to argue that the creative act is a trace of the body's disappearance: the loss of humanity and the deconstruction of the subject objectify themselves in the image, and art resides in the tension between representation and its loss, ultimately leaving nothing but an image.

Starting from the influential figure of Antonin Artaud, the author weaves critical and poetic connections between the texts and works of Jean Dubuffet, Jan Fabre and Anselm Kiefer, Yves Klein and Gutai, Joë Bousquet, Camille Bryen and Francis Ponge, Gaston Bachelard, Gilles Deleuze, Georges Bataille and Aby Warburg. The material is not a thematic pretext but an active and explosive catapult that questions the arbitrary linearity of a conventionally assimilated history of art. Following Ponge's example, the principles of poetry are applied to criticism, resulting in an approach dangerously suited to its object: an anti-critique.

The chosen materials — stone paper for the jacket, recycled paper for the pages — are consistent with all this, intending to give the impression of being covered in dust. The essay disrupts traditional reading habits and inhabits the writing space differently, inviting the reader to choose between several reading paths and to treat criticism as one would poetry.

“What we ask for is to be able to celebrate the insubstantial, the void, the shadow, the dry grass, the stones of crumbling walls, and the dust that we breathe.” — Gianni Celati