I'm stuck. Or rather, my eyes are trapped within the broken confines of this Pere Borell del Caso painting. The flesh looks living. The shadows on the painted frame enhance the trompe-l'oeil sense of reality. The boy's look of wonder is the physiognomy of utter shock, mimicking the moment Pinocchio realizes he can move without Geppetto's strings. Made from the hand of del Caso, the painting interacts with my eyes with a livingness that the artist couldn't create but could only gesture toward. Yet still my eyes are trapped.
The face that I look into evades my gaze and resists the association with mimicry. There's no representation here--the painting is wont to say--but rather a gesture towards the way images capture the eye with their faux-sense of reality.
And so I reflect, here, on how my eye gets drawn to faces--both painted and embodied--and how the phenomenologically different experiences of gazing at texts and gazing at bodies needs some analysis. Sometimes I'm trapped by language, words enveloping me in an imaginary world. Is this world experientially different from being captured in the frame of a trompe-l'oeil?
I wonder: how does language work and what are the limits of its being modeled via the visual?
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