A painting usually appears to us like a completed image, independent, often highlighted by a frame that underscores the material limits of a vision, of a unity separated from the environment where, however, it is found. The image sometimes has an underlying perspective framework which contributes to rendering the likeness of the represented scene, and yet separates it still more from the surrounding physical space.
Another perspective, this time mental or symbolic, brings us to suppose that in a painting other paintings can shine through or exist…All the paintings of an author (all the paintings of the History of Art) make only one?
Our vision is mobile, precarious; that of the painting – if we wanted to attribute on to it – is fixed, immobile, it doesn’t move and it doesn’t turn off. Works of art look at us.They are the ones that look at us, and not vice versa. The work doen’t speak, but it sees, it sees us in exactly the moment we think we’re seeing it.
Giulio Paolini
(The author who thought he existed, Giulio Paolini, Johan & Levi Editore, 2012)
