Painting isn’t an aesthetic operation; it’s a form of magic designed as a mediator between this strange hostile world and us, a way of seizing the power by giving form to our terrors as well as our desires.

Picasso frames painting not as refined “aesthetic” pleasure but as an urgent, almost ritual act: an attempt to negotiate with a world experienced as threatening and incomprehensible. Calling art “magic” emphasizes efficacy over beauty—images are made to do something (to protect, to transform, to give mastery), not merely to be admired. The painter becomes a mediator who externalizes inner forces—fear, desire, obsession—into visible form, thereby making them graspable and shareable. In this view, representation is a kind of psychic technology: by giving shape to terrors and longings, art converts passive vulnerability into active agency, turning private emotion into a structured, communicable reality.