"...the time that animates pictorial space must belong to the structure of the painting."(277) Are we here equating pictorial with painting? I don't think so, at least it needn't be that way.

We can let that go, there must be paintings that are not pictorial, and pictorial art that is not painting.  (Leave that for now, we may come back to this point in a further consideration of the pictorial work.  We might, for all we know now, need a separate consideration of painting, as a non-pictorial form of art.) In any case, I do not think that Dufrenne is treating painting as necessarily pictorial, at least, we know that he does not consider it necessarily representational.  So what is the pictorial?

Dufrenne provides a rather cryptic discussion of the mainfestation of time in space (on pages 276-277).  The conclusion seems to be that although the work has a temporal existence, this is not the crucial temporal nature that we need to understand.  The time in the work as a work of art must meet the condition stated above.  Of course the painting is aging in the ordinary way.  The colors are fading, the canvas is decaying in various ways, or whatever the materials do.  We can just preserve the canvass, but that is not (just so) a work of art.  If there is a work of art, it may have time as part of its structure.  The pictorial space does something analogous to what space does for time. 

I don’t quite remember it, but I think Hawking says something about entropy as giving a direction to time.  Maybe thinking of time as having a direction is already using a spacial metaphor, and Dufrenne wants to make use of something similar here.  He does not talk about entropy, but he does mention motion.  Time “. . . has to entry by proxy, under the guise of movement. . . . But we must distinguish movement from the trajectory of movement."(277) Even in real space, the movement of the rock across the water leaves the ripples, which are not the movement of the rock, but leave a trail, a trajectory, that while not the movement, it is evidence of motion.  So motion gives us time, and the trajectory implies motion.  We can have neither time nor motion directly in the pictorial object (qua work of art), but we can have the trajectories.

“In other words, pictorial space becomes temporalized when it is given to us as a structured and oriented space in which certain privileged lines constitute trajectories that, instead of appearing to us as the inert residue of some movement, appear as filled with a movement realized in immobility."(277-278)

We have, then, found something that can reside in the pictorial work (the painting let’s say) and has some connection to time.  Further, the trajectories in the work can be both representational and actual.  There can be brush strokes that are themselves intrinsic to the work, and are themselves trajectories.  They imply the motion of the brush.  At the same time (not necessarily in the same work or the same part of the work) there can be representations of the ripples in the water that are trajectories because they are the lines left by the motion of the rock.  Every permutation on these considerations is also possible.  There can be representations of motions that within the painting, have no motion.  There can be representations of immobile objects that themselves have motion.  Dufrenne mentions Van Gogh’s olive trees in contrast to Gericault’s horses.

As we might expect, Dufrenne next invokes Kant.