The Situated Line

Marco Raimondo

Introduction: the significance of my line

In art the line is often treated as a foundation: the element that defines form and holds structure together. But a line can also do something else. It can carry a sensation, record a moment of contact with the world, and open a space instead of closing a shape.

In my work the line comes first, before any image and before any idea of making art. Understanding where it comes from, and what happens to it afterwards, is the simplest way into my process.

Where the line comes from

My lines are born in ordinary life, not in the studio. They are sketches made while my attention is elsewhere, guided less by the eye than by sensations and by what I absorb, without noticing, from my surroundings. The hand moves before thought decides.

This is why I call the line situated. It is neither a pure expression of an inner world nor a description of the outer one. It happens where the two meet: in the daily, mostly unconscious exchange between a person and the reality in which they are immersed.

Beyond automatism

The comparison with Surrealist automatism is natural, and it helps to clarify what my line is not. The Surrealists made automatism a method: a deliberate technique for silencing rational control and letting the unconscious speak. The gesture was free, but the decision to be free came first.

My sketches do not come from that decision. They arise outside any artistic intention, so there is nothing to free them from. What surfaces in them is not a Freudian unconscious waiting to be revealed, but something earlier: a pre-conscious, pre-symbolic layer where the separation between self and world has not yet taken place.

Two kinds of line coexist in these sketches. Fluid lines that wander and loop, and broken, precise lines that interrupt them and bring a measured order. The tension between abandonment and control is already there before any elaboration begins.

The two times of the line

The sketch is only the first time of the work. The second begins when I return to it through Digital Stain Immersion. I scan the sketch and subject it to selective adjustments of brightness, contrast and saturation, until the line becomes a chromatic field. Then the image returns to matter: as a print, as paint, as wax.

Each of these passages is an immersion. The surface absorbs, filters and reflects back, and what emerges is never what I expected. I do not apply a plan to the line; I respond to what each immersion leaves behind.

The final image holds both times together: the speed of a gesture that lasted a few seconds and the slowness of the weeks spent inside it.

Deleuze, recognized after the fact

Only after years of this practice did I find in Gilles Deleuze concepts in which I could recognize what I was already doing. They did not shape the work. They helped me name it.

The fold. Deleuze uses the fold (le pli) to think of a reality in which inside and outside are not separate: the outside folds inward, and the inside is nothing but a fold of the outside. My fluid lines behave this way. They bend back on themselves and build layers, so that a single line holds both the sensation it records and the world that provoked it. Each immersion adds another fold.

The diagram. In his book on Francis Bacon, Deleuze calls diagram the set of free marks a painter introduces to break the cliché and open a space from which a new form can emerge. The diagram does not represent; it acts. But it must also be held in check, or it swallows the whole picture.

My sketch works in a similar way. It is the chaotic, operative core of the image. The digital elaboration does not impose an order from outside; it lets a structure emerge from the sketch while keeping its energy alive. The result is not a definitive image but an unstable balance, a new visible held between structure and flow.

A line that acts on sensation

For Deleuze, painting does not tell a story; it acts directly on sensation. This is also how I think about my images. Fluid and broken lines, freedom and precision, do not narrate. They produce states, perceptions, a particular way of standing in front of the work.

This is why I do not consider the meaning of an image fixed within it. Meaning happens in the encounter between the one who made the image, the image itself and the one who looks at it. The viewer's gaze is, in a sense, a final immersion: one more surface that absorbs, filters and reflects back.

Conclusion: the line as a living act

My line is never static and never isolated. It is born as a response to the world, before any intention. It is returned to, immersed and transformed. It is completed only in the eyes of someone else.

Between gesture and diagram, between flow and structure, between the instant of its origin and the time of its making, the line remains what it was at the start: an act, not a representation.