There are three kinds of people: those who see, those who see when they are shown, and those who do not see.
Leonardo da Vinci
This is an eye caught a moment before it could close.
The light came faster than the pupil. Before it had time to narrow, before the lid could flinch, the shutter had already taken what was there: the dark centre, the brown ring around it, a single point of light reflected on the surface. Around it, the face has been painted over in red, and the paint has dried and cracked like the varnish of an old master's canvas, with flecks of green and gold caught in the cracks.
We like to think the eye is a window. It is not. It is a door that opens inwards. What we call seeing is a picture painted somewhere behind it, in a locked room, by a painter we never meet. The eye only brings him the paints. And most of the time he paints what he already believes, because whatever goes against it simply does not reach the canvas.
That is why it is so hard to look anyone in the eye for long. Everything is written there: what they want, what they fear, what they have decided not to know about themselves. The only real discipline is the one Leonardo meant: to keep the door open, and not to lie to the painter inside.
Innervision is the artist's founding idea of seeing from within, and the name of the art collective he created and led in his early years, gathering the people who made those first projects with him. Every later work in this collection in which an eye is replaced by something else, cameras, an hourglass, a crystal, a jeweller's lens, descends from this one.
(Fine Art Photography. Created in 2014.)
