The Japanese theatrical face is not painted (powdered), it is written. This unforeseen movement occurs: though painting and writing have the same original instrument, the brush, it is not painting, however, which seduces writing with its decorative style, its sprawling, caressing touch, its representative space (as no doubt would have happened with us in the West, for whom the civilized future of a function is always its esthetic ennoblement); on the contrary, it is the act of writing which subjugates the pictorial gesture, so that painting is always only writing. This theatrical face (masked in Noh, drawn in Kabuki, artificial in Bunraku) is made from two substances: the white of the paper, the black of the inscription (reserved for the eyes).