The Invisible Truth: Frenhofer and Hervé Guibert on Photo/Videography

Honoré de Balzac’s The Unknown Masterpiece presents the enigmatic painter Frenhofer, whose radical aesthetic creed still unsettles our understanding of art. He declares:

“Form is an illusion. Color is an illusion. Truth exists, but it dwells in what cannot be seen.”
« La forme est une illusion. La couleur est une illusion. La vérité existe, mais elle est dans l’invisible. »

With these words, Frenhofer dismantles the conventional belief that art’s mission is faithful representation. For him, visible contours and hues are deceptive surfaces; the true task of the painter is to evoke the invisible essence that cannot be reduced to lines or pigments.

This paradox resonates with the writings of Hervé Guibert, the French writer and photographer who interrogated the photograph’s claim to truth. In L’Image fantôme (1981), Guibert insists:

“By the time the photograph reaches my eyes, it is already a phantom. The subject exists only as a trace, untouchable.”
« La photographie, quand elle me parvient, est déjà un fantôme. Le sujet n’existe plus que comme une trace, intouchable. »

Photography, then, does not offer us presence but rather the residue of absence.

Frenhofer’s Invisible Truth

Frenhofer seeks not appearances but the hidden vitality of being. The painter’s duty is not to imitate but to conjure an irreducible force of life. His final masterpiece — buried under layers of paint until it collapses into abstraction — embodies his paradox: the closer he gets to truth, the less visible it becomes.

Guibert’s Photographic Paradox

Guibert, too, understood images as haunted by absence. Elsewhere in L’Image fantôme, he remarks:

“A photograph is silent like the dead, yet this silence speaks with unbearable intensity.”
« La photographie est muette comme un mort, mais ce mutisme parle avec une intensité insoutenable. »

For Guibert, photography is less a proof of reality than a device of mourning, a way of conjuring what has already slipped away.

Convergence: Between the Seen and the Unseen

What unites Frenhofer and Guibert is the conviction that the essence of art lies not in representation but in its gesture toward the unseen. Frenhofer dissolves visibility in the search for life; Guibert accepts that photography always arrives contaminated by loss. Both show us that the truth of art arises in the tension between revealing and concealing.

In an age overflowing with images, their lesson is urgent: to look beyond visibility, to recognize illusion as part of perception’s fabric, and to embrace absence, invisibility, and mystery as the very ground of art’s truth.