“What happens to a poetic utterance when the rhetoric, the basis of understanding, is broken?” asked Christopher LeBrun in an interview in Artforum in December 1982. Reconstructing a painterly rhetoric—that total armature without which belief in a fiction proves impossible—requires a ratio of disjunction, a disregard for principles of correctness. Based on the recognition of loss, it is an exercise in discipline, the recovery of enabling conventions and the summons to eloquence itself. Without rhetoric, definitions of the process of creation itself founder; distinctions between beginnings and