Bas les masques!
"Be human if you want to be original, today no one is" (Max Jacob). In the same vein and with his dark humor, Oscar Wilde said "Be yourself, the others are already taken!" Without doubt two of the most popular quotes, after the unavoidable Cartesian "cogito ergo sum", regularly found within the excessive production of books on personal development and other positive thoughts (sic) that pollute bookstores shelves today... But is it reason enough to discredit this truism that we should maybe repeat to ourselves more frequently? Make the effort of being yourself, quite a challenge...
Max Jacob plays here with the double meaning of the term "original", since by being original (authentic, true, sincere, honest), I am original (singular, not like the others that are not original anymore). Moreover, the use of the imperative "be" leads at first sight to a sort of paradoxical order (double bind), because there is necessarily a contradiction between a demand for voluntary action, a goal to be reached, a conscious effort and the fact of remaining authentic, natural, "rough and ready". For Max, this paradox can be lifted if we become aware that, in our thoughts and actions, we are cluttered with a thousand fruitless social codes, a thousand speeches received and tacitly accepted without the necessary preliminary questions. We would have to wash ourselves of all our reductive prejudices, stereotypes and media simplifications, become a complete "thinking being" again, exercising its critical mind on everything, every speech and every action, in order to reaffirm this profound humanity.
But what does this have to do with matériO', could you ask me… Well, at our modest level, and because we suffer from a recurring tropism that pushes us to reduce everything to this particular angle of watching material innovation, this is what materiO' tries to do every day with its thousands of selected treasures: talk about them while cleaning useless residues of marketing lines and sales key points, getting rid of empty words and hollow ideas, and focusing on talking about these original materials (singular, atypical, extra-ordinary) using facts and tangible and intimate information… In summary, presenting you with each material in its original version!
Quentin
