A close analysis of the work of Brazilian artist Ernesto Neto reveals the fundamental stakes of a contemporary art in the process of undoing the image-form. The first volume of Eric Alliez and Jean-Claude Bonne's major work on contemporary art begins by outlining their exploratory and speculative project: not so much to produce a new "philosophy of art" as to enter into a space in-between philosophy and art-between a contemporary philosophy of contemporary art and an art contemporary with contemporary philosophy. But what exactly is the "contemporary"? And how can we make ourselves, philosophically, the contemporaries of works whose problematic nature no longer sits well under the categories of the "aesthetic," inherited from romanticism? In these case-studies of an art-thought that is inseparable from the continued construction of the very concept of a "contemporary art," philosophical analysis is continually displaced by the forces of works and practices of creation and reception that herald a new-processual and post-conceptual-configuration of art, with Matisse and Duchamp-Matisse-thought and Duchamp-thought-establishing a tension that, since the 1960s, has been "recharged" by the micropolitical options which have given rise to the critical and clinical problematisation of art. Moving through and beyond the thought of Deleuze and Guattari, the discovery of a diagrammatic regime of the contemporary synonymous with an undoing of the image of the aesthetic regime of art begins here with the work of Brazilian artist Ernesto Neto, as a close analysis of the diagrammatic forces at work in Leviathan Thot, Neto's major 2006 intervention in the Pantheon de la republique, reveals the fundamental stakes of a contemporary art in the process of undoing the image-form. Neto's "anarchitectural denunciation" takes on the (Hobbesian) metaphysical enunciation of the Leviathan-state, which his monstrous "counter-installation" recalls and reproblematizes by placing all of the Pantheon's physical and metaphysical coordinates into and under tension. Grappling with this foreign body both critically and clinically, Alliez and Bonne reveal how the "Neto Operation" engages with nothing less than the image of power in its relation to the power of the image that animates it and endows it with a discursive existence.

A reevaluation of Matisse that reveals the complex function of his work and thought in contemporary art's escape from the image, from traditional forms of art, and even from the art form itself. Accused by his contemporaries of both arid overtheorisation and a hedonistic abandon to the pleasures of color, decried for a preoccupation with the merely decorative, retrospectively consigned to a subsidiary role in an official History of Art that sees the liberation of color from iconic conventions and symbolic associations as the inevitable precursor to the purified color of modernist formalis, Matisse, with his untimely singularity, his break with the History of Art, and the part he played in undoing the image is ripe for the reevaluation undertaken here with great panache by Eric Alliez and Jean-Claude Bonne, who with this volume restore Matisse to his place within the prehistory of contemporary art, while continuing to transform our understanding of the latter. It was Matisse who, with his understanding of the construction of colours as a means of vital expression, continued to exacerbate the fauves' decisive break with Form; in doing so, he also opened up painting to its outside, by cutting out color, and releasing it onto the walls and into architecture by way of a decorativity virtually generalized to the whole environment. With a series of detailed and compelling extended analyses of Matisse's works, we learn how "Matisse-thought" arrived at the magic formula expression=construction=decoration. This volume, the second "case study" in Alliez and Bonne's Undoing the Image, gives us a new Matisse extracted from cliches and stereotypes both popular and learned, revealing the complex function of his work and thought in contemporary art's escape from the image, from traditional forms of art, and even from the art form itself.