Like gods of mythology who discourse in the shape of frogs, or sometimes trees or white bulls, the eighty blues composed by François Tusques are multiform; they make tales and they offer images.

Each one of the eighty blues is exposed in its four states: a musical notation, a tale, a box-of-images and a pictogram.

The music of cinema, as one knows, accompanies a story in images. At the opposite, - in a subtle and fugitive way - words, ideas and images accompany a music when played for itself. Tales and visions that are hidding behind the melody feed our oculus imaginarius, this mental camera which provides us an uninterrupted internal spectacle and discourse.

Because the blues does not remain vegetating in the dark cellar of a jazzclub where worn velvet walls are impregnated with cold tobacco and emanations of white lightning - the bootlegged whisky of Billie Holliday - the blues, as well, is not confined to singing of lost love! No. The blues runs in a meadow under the sun, collecting shells, pollens and stars. It tells how a tree became the voice of Eric Dolphy; how an electric bulb at the bottom of a garage in the north of Spain consumes its 40 watts of love for Ihfuli, the daughter of Zeus, or the blues describes Don Cherry's horn chokebore. It speaks about the wild splendour of Higgs' Boson or the nonsense of the concept of progress in art; it reports the advice that Thelonious Monk lavished on Mondriaan in New York in 1940; it teaches us that the cluster of Perseus emits, for 250 million years lights, a B flat, a B flat located fifty-seven octaves below what our ear perceives! Further, the blues, praises the Querpéen people who invented the clock to prevent everything from happening all at once.

When the blues leaves its specific sound existence, its visual appearance - its personality - shows up as a coloured construction, a composition which is similar, or equivalent, to its musical structure. This composition raises the fundamental concept of structure that Frank Lloyd Wright regarded as "the greatest invention of our century in the field of thought".

The structure of each blues is considered in order to extract from it a synthetic reading: a pictogram.

From the "abstract" character of the decorative elements in the Persian, Chinese, Islamic traditions... to the research of Paul Klee, one will find an approach similar to those of the proposed pictograms in this work. For Klee anyhow, the fact of transposing a polyphonic composition in the plastic field is a quasi-banal step, "whose interest starts only with the most deep penetration in this sphere of cosmic nature". Matisse evoked analogies between painting and the harmonies of music. Analogy: the master word... Mondriaan was living musical analogies, one may represents him dancing the fox-trot in his studio while placing and moving coloured adhesives on his canvas. On his side - the other side - so to speak, Edgar Varèse used to leave a musical composition in progress, go to paint, and then come back to work on his score.

The passage from a musical form to a plastic form has its existence in the beat of lightning, fading immediately.

In order to obtain a transposition, a space has to be sought (and reached.) in which sound arrangements and visual arrangements fuse. This point is located upstream from each of them, in a kind of understatement of space. In this area difficult to access, we may enter - after many attempts - through the most unexpected medium: distraction. Julio Cortázar, in his beautiful text Around the day in 80 words, observes that this status, which is defined under the name of distraction, is as well a different form of attention.