To be visible is to be present: to be absent is to be invisible. A voice, a perfume or something microscopic may be present and yet invisible, not because of its whereabouts but because of its nature. The function of painting is to fill an absence with the simulacrum of a presence. Occasionally a portrait hangs in a room where the sitter is still to be found, but this is exceptional and, from the time of the palaeolithic cave paintings onwards, the main task of painting has been to contradict a law which governs the visible: to make what is not present ‘seen’.
Absence is subtended by time and space. And so it is not surprising that painting, which contests absence, has a special relation to them. Thinking about time [‘Painting and time’, this page above] I asked: why is a static painted image in a dynamic world not absurd? The related question now is: with what kind of space does a painting surround the ‘presence’ it depicts? To reply by talking about systems of perspective or non-perspective is inadequate. Something happens to space within and around a painted image prior to any perspective system. Every painting begins with the word ‘here’. But where is this here?
Let us first consider the space surrounding the image, then later the space within it. During the Renaissance architecture was named the Mother of the Arts. This was because the principal visual arts have their being within architectural space. This space differs from natural space (that of the earth, the oceans, the sky) insofar as it encloses, and encloses in such a way as to make a formal distinction between inside and outside.
A hollow tree or a cave can enclose and offer shelter, but they have not been created with this in mind: the shelter they offer is contingent. The tree has died, the waters have subsided and, as a result, man can make use of a vacated interior. No alternative space has been proposed to nature’s. By contrast, the humblest building makes such a proposal. It proposes a humanly created space which is not only a shelter, but a vantage point from which to break the otherwise endless, regardless extension of natural space. To break it by making the formal distinction: interior/exterior.
Something painted or carved may be placed in a wilderness, far from any human habitation, but, when this happens, the image only works as an appeal to a superhuman power who exists outside time and space. No image can withstand natural or cosmic space alone: the draught extinguishes its flame. As soon as an image is addressed, at least partially to other people, it requires the mediation of the space proposed by a human habitation or a human tomb: it needs to be surrounded by other human work (this ‘surrounding’ was at the origin of architecture), it needs the assurance of an interior.
It is sufficient to imagine coming across a painted panel by Dürer floating face-up in the middle of the Baltic, or a sculpture by Phidias in the middle of the tundra. Quite apart from any concern one might feel about their physical survival, their meaning would be obliterated, dispersed by the empty space around them; they would speak only of their own abandonment.
Consider the visual arts of nomadic peoples. For obvious functional reasons their art is mostly applied to what they wear or carry. The human body (or occasionally the body of an animal) offers something of the permanence that architecture offers to the settled. The myths of nomads relate how people are visited, spirits entering the head and body of the hunter. The body becomes a kind of habitation. Yet without the actual physical space of architecture, the visual signs and symbols of nomadic art rarely become images in the figurative sense. They do not depict the absent. This may also be because the nomad has a different relation to space. Perhaps he has less need of images transporting the far to the near, for he himself lives mysteriously between the two.
The image, then, has its place. And it’s not anywhere. If architecture is the Mother of the Arts, it is so because it protects them from endless space by introducing the distinction interior/exterior. The metaphor of Mother is well chosen for the body of a real mother does something similar for the imagination of her child.
Let us now look at the space within an image. As soon as a painting is addressed principally to other human beings (as perhaps the cave paintings were not) it is conceived of as a framed image. The picture frame is fairly recent but the regular format of a painted surface – be it rectangular, circular, oval – acts as a frame. The image has edges and, being geometric, they contain it.
And from this arises the need for composition. Composition begins with a simple question: where in the given format is it best to put this? And this, and this. The laws of composition change from epoch to epoch, but the act of composing is always the act of placing forms within a contained, separate space. To compose is to arrange an interior.
Yet what does it mean here to arrange an interior? Paintings depict the boundless world. Even when an event depicted occurs within an interior – as in one of Saenredam’s churches – the people depicted have come from outside. A still life is what has been brought in, through the door. Most paintings depict women, the sky, the earth, the sun, wild animals, towns, rivers, the sea, flowers, heroes, the darkness of the night, gods, mountains, trees, grass. When painted, all are arranged as if they constituted an interior, as if they were side by side with the intimate. To paint is to bring inside – doubly: into the inhabited space around the image and into the frame. The paradox of painting is that it invites the spectator into its room to look at the world beyond.
Hence the terms of its fundamental dialectic. To paint is to bring inside: yet what is brought inside is what is far away. The terms of this contradiction are never settled once and for all. At different historical moments, in different cultures, the language of painting has favoured one term more than the other. For example, the language of the Byzantine tradition from the fourth to the eighth century, or of the Italian Quattrocento, favoured the ‘bringing inside’; and by contrast, the language of the Mannerist school of the sixteenth century, or of early Romanticism, favoured ‘the boundless’.
During one period the given ideological explanations of the world seem largely convincing and then the will of paintings is to include; during another the given explanations seem to be lies, and then the will of painting is to search for the open truth in the boundless or cosmic. Yet whatever it wills, the act of painting necessarily brings about an inclusion.
In Turner’s work, for instance, we can distinctly see how the will changed. In his landscapes painted under the influence of Claude Lorraine in the 1820s entire panoramas are brought inside. Ten, twenty years later – in pictures like ‘Snow-Storm Steam-Boat off Harbour-Mouth’ (even the title is revealing!) – Turner was to struggle more totally than any other painter before him, to make the image boundless, to destroy the home, the habitation.
So painting has its place. But it also has its reason. Its interiorization of the world – with more or less confidence – corresponds to a human need.
The visible was always and still remains our principal source of information about the world. Through the visible we orientate ourselves. Even perceptions coming from other senses, we translate into visual terms. (Vertigo is a pathological example: originating in the ear, we experience it as a visual, spatial confusion.) It is thanks to the visible that we recognize space as the precondition for physical existence. The visible brings the world to us. But at the same time it reminds us ceaselessly that it is a world in which we risk to be lost. The visible with its space also takes the world away from us. Nothing is more two-faced.
The visible implies an eye. It is the stuff of the relation between seen and seer. Yet the seer, when human, is conscious of what his eye cannot and will never see because of time and distance. The visible both includes him (because he sees) and excludes him (because he is not omnipresent). The visible consists for him of the seen which, even when it is threatening, confirms his existence, and of the unseen which defies that existence. The desire to have seen (the ocean, the desert, the aurora borealis) has a deep ontological basis.
To this human ambiguity of the visible one then has to add the visual experience of absence, whereby we no longer see what we saw. We face a dis-appearance. And a struggle ensues to prevent what has disappeared falling into the negation of the unseen, defying our existence.
Thus the visible produces faith in the reality of the invisible, and provokes the development of an inner eye which retains, and assembles and arranges as if an interior, as if what has been seen will be forever partly protected against the ambush of space, which is absence. Thus a phenomenological experience of space supports the special nature of the painted image. But if this were its sole support, the determination of painting would be nostalgic and this is only partly true. There is also revelation.
Both life itself and the visible owe their existence to light. Before there was life, nothing was seen – unless by God. Neither the optical explanation of visual perception nor the evolutionist theory of the slow, hazardous development of the eye in response to the stimulus of light – neither of these dissolves the enigma which surrounds the fact that, at a certain moment, the visible was born, at a certain moment appearances were revealed as appearances. As a response to this enigma, the first faculty accredited to the most important gods was that of sight: an eye, often an all-seeing eye. Then it could be said: the visible exists because it has already been seen.
The Genesis story is consistent with this. The first thing God created was light. After every subsequent act of creation, the light allowed him to see that what he had created was good. At the end of the sixth day he saw everything that he had made and, behold, it was very good. One does not need to get involved here with the argument between Darwinists and Creationists. What is profound about the Genesis story is that it acknowledges the mystery of the visible’s coming into being. This mystery is sustained and repeated in the almost universal experience of what is now called natural beauty. Whatever normative categories are employed, such beauty is always experienced as a form of revelation. It speaks.
What happens when it speaks? The Sung masters, Ovid, Meister Eckhart, Izaak Walton, Rimbaud, Tolstoi … what artist or thinker has not testified to these moments? The testimony varies according to the character and the historical time. But the mechanism of the moment remains the same.
A rose is a rose is a rose. What happens is that appearance and significance, look and meaning, become identical, whereas usually they are separate and have to be brought together by the one who is looking and questioning. A revelation is this fusion.
And the fusion changes one’s spatial sense or, rather, changes one’s sense of Being in space. The boundlessly visible, as we have noted, includes but also excludes man. He sees, and he sees that he is being continually abandoned. Appearances belong to the boundless space of the visible. With his inner eye man also experiences the space of his own imagination and reflection. (The relation between the two spaces, whether they are not perhaps different forms of the same thing, is another subject.) Normally it is within the protection of his inner space that man places, retains, cultivates, lets run wild or constructs meaning. At the moment of revelation when appearance and meaning become identical, the space of physics and the seer’s inner space coincide: momentarily and exceptionally she or he achieves an equality with the visible. To lose all sense of exclusion; to be at the centre.
The way that all painting, irrespective of its epoch or tradition, interiorizes, brings inside, arranges as a home the visible, is far more than a simple complement to the enclosing act of architecture; it is a way of safeguarding the experiences of memory and revelation which are man’s only defences against that boundless space which otherwise continually threatens to separate and marginalize him.
What is painted survives within the shelter of the painting, within the shelter of the having-been-seen. The home of a true painting is this shelter.
1982