The format of paintings displayed
In today’s crit, some of the comments about the work were aimed on the format of the paintings, how they are displayed etc. One of the comments mentioned how the painting’s cropped format makes the viewer think of the editing in cinema. The cropping made the painting look more violent and like there is more to be said.. there was also a mention about the emotion with which they were cropped. Following comment was about how the paintings work together and how the meaning of the works wouldn’t come across as ‘violent’ and filled with narrative like now if they were separated. Matthew Bowman connected my work’s display to photographs of 1938s. The reason for that was that photography in that year was in a format in which the second picture that followed the previous one would explain more about the meaning of the first one. The same is in my paintings as the first, higher painting would not make sense of the narrative without the second one underneath.
The paintings (colour, scale etc.)
In the paintings, the viewers mentioned words like: The look, The Gaze, Voyeurism. Which are things actually connecting to my work. Voyeurism (or scopophilia) which is translated as the pleasure of looking. It is best described by Freud as one of the component instincts of sexuality which leads to the interpretation of a human as an object, subjecting them to a controlling and curious gaze. That pleasure of looking then grows into perversion.
To that, I want to mention another comment by the viewers which was about the format of the painting being almost like a little hole, making them feel like they are the voyeurs themselves. It made the viewer to also follow the eye of the man shown on the lower painting. The gaze here seemed to them unsettling.
