Comme un poisson dans l’eau. Expériences, rêveries et poétiques de la lumière

Light is by nature ambivalent: wave and corpuscular, material and immaterial, physical and psychophysiological phenomenon, in turn dazzling and twilight, source of visibility and warmth, a condition of clarity and illusion, the principle of colors but also determinant in our perception of surfaces, volumes, textures or atmospheres, the light is always at the heart of our conceptions of the world, religious, mythological or scientific, because it is the object of experiences, perceptions, experiments, of representations and theorisations which never cease to mix categories. This paper aims to study the way in which these natural ambiguities of the luminous phenomenon have contributed and still contribute diversely to the enrichment of our knowledge and our symbolic and cultural productions, in the confines of fields as diverse as the architecture and the everyday life, the visual arts and the images of literature, the aesthetics and the philosophy, etc. Choosing pluridisciplinarity and interdisciplinarity, the paper brings together the contributions and the categories of poets as Paul Claudel, Paul Valéry, of historians of art and architecture as Alois Riegl and August Schmarsow, Heinrich Wollflin and Harry Frances Malgrave, of philosophers as Robert Vischer, Walter Benjamin and Henry Maldiney, of artists and art critics and literary scholars as Yves Klein and Claire Bishop, who show how, in different contexts and at different times, the ambivalences of light have constantly aroused questions and encouraged to cross the boundaries by porosities and inter-fertilizations in the arts, humanities and exact sciences.