It is therefore the sacred, sacred painting, which is in question. That is to say, not painting used to represent religious themes, but the sacred proper to painting itself – and, in general, to the re-productive technique of the world. The sacred operates by setting aside or setting apart, insofar as this distancing is the condition of the relation or of communication – or more precisely, insofar as this gap is the condition of the infinitude of the relation. (The sacred is nothing other than the ordinary condition of communication: reserve, threshold, access without access.)

Painting cuts out a space – the most basic sacred gesture, the trace of the templum. The templum is the cut-out of the heavens, the caeli lucida templa that Lucretius speaks of and also calls magnas caeli cavernas.2 The templum is a hollowing-out of the heavens which defines relations, and, consequently, non-relations as well.

– from “The Technique of the Present“, by Jean-Luc Nancy