Painted eyes
"AND MY EYES ALSO MAKE LIGHT YOU SHOULD TAKE AN UMBRELLA"[1].
The painted look: a guide? An absence or a presence? A place of expression, it is what binds us. Or unbinds us. It reflects the state of several subjects: the one who creates, the one who is represented and the one who contemplates.
Whether it's the gaze of admonishing figures in altarpieces or history paintings; a playful gaze, like that of the Mona Lisa; a blind gaze, like that of Georges de La Tour's Old Man with a Dog (1620) [2]; or an absent gaze, like that of Gideon Rubin's figures, the artist paints the presence he desires.
Whether or not the depicted subject is looking at us, it's there. In its flight, as in its frontality. It can do nothing but face us, even when its back is turned. Even when it has all the depth and perspective of the world to escape from. It's there, on the flat surface of the support, in its materiality. The viewer's space is filled with this plane, and the sight of the painting opens his mind.
Creator and spectator pause for a moment, suspended. Our eyes wander around and their fields are no longer the same. Our gaze continues on its way, crossing our inner places with those of the painting.
Mahault de Raymond-Cahuzac
Image: Odilon Redon, Les Yeux clos, 1890, Musée d'Orsay © Photo: Mahault de Raymond-Cahuzac
