Paintings See Us More Clearly Than We See Ourselves
Something about viewing art in a public space feels unsettlingly exposing. What happens if we lean into the discomfort, and watch the canvas turn into a looking-glass…
I have never stood for half an hour straight in front of a painting before. The closest I’ve come was Girodet’s Scène du Deluge (1806) in the Louvre — an almost floor to ceiling instillation of oil on canvas. On a clifftop, it depicts a desperate father, trying but failing to save his family from the incoming flood. The twisted, oddly proportioned naked bodies, illuminated and obscured by sublime light, makes it too terrifying to miss. I first saw it on a school trip in 2014, and it seemed bigger than everything. (Literally, it was). But also emotionally, it seemed bigger than everything. I, a 12-year-old schoolgirl, clutching my crumpled workbook, shrunk in its presence. Eight years later, I returned to the Louvre, when visiting a friend in Paris. I wondered what effect eight years’ absence would have, but I stood beholden to it once again, an awestruck child.
Every time I have visited a gallery since, I have craved that feeling. Sometimes, I think, I have been guilty of manufacturing some pseudo-imitation of it. Then I saw Jordan Casteel’s Yvonne and James (2017) in The Time Is Always Now exhibition. I’d found it again — the bigness.
It was worlds away from the terror of Deluge, instilling a sense of comfort, not fear. Yet, just like Deluge, it was the first painting positioned through the doorway, so that as you entered, it demanded an onlooker. Yvonne and James greeted me with that look that said, “We’ve been expecting you”. It was a thrill to have been expected.
The portrait depicts an elderly African-American couple, sitting on a bench in Harlem, subtly smiling and holding hands. Yvonne wears a green puffer vest, pastel pink tracksuit with a beanie to match. James sits just behind her, in a black beanie, dark brown tracksuit, and chestnut parka. You’d assume it was cold, but Casteel paints in a way that suggests she never knew the meaning of cold. The layers of oil paint are thick, the lines are rustic, beaten, potato-peeled. A yellow glow in the canvas’ far corner stretches across them, and yet it seems as if they were responsible for emitting the glow. Without them there, you’d feel the winter.
I found myself smiling back at the painting, copying Yvonne’s own expression. I’d die of embarrassment if anyone saw. It was a secret smile, just between us three, and far too intimate to share. “We can see you”, they said. In the lines of their face, the folds of their clothes, they saw me so deeply that the prospect of being seen by anyone else suddenly felt like a rude, meaningless interruption. I could not unroot my feet from that spot.
As Ekow Eshun, the exhibition curator, wrote, the selected works reframe the Black figure and ‘invite a shift in the dominant historical perspective’. In this instance, the shift seems to come from refreshing ordinariness. Bar the actual colour of the paint used for their skin, Casteel presents no identifying stereotypes of “Blackness”; even the background is bare. Our focus is the human couple, and their focus is you. There is something simultaneously confrontational and comforting in their perpetually held gaze, looking outward to meet you.
Yvonne sat in her wobbly white chair like a throne. She was the one who really saw me, but James was the one who knew what she saw. I wrote that down on my phone, so I wouldn’t forget it, but as I looked up, they’d caught my eye again, as if to say, “What are you writing, child? We saw that!”. Nothing got past them, and I didn’t want anything to.
We had spent so much accidental time together, that leaving them felt disrespectful. It reminded me of all those times when you go to your grandparents’ house to drop something off quickly, or only mean to stop by and say hello, but you can’t leave, because they chat to you longer, feed you, insist on keeping you. And you, grateful for their time and love, don’t really resist.
