20/09/2019
THE PORTRAIT OF DORIANA GRAY
OR HOW WE SEE THE ARTWORK
I took this picture like three years ago when my historical fiction Heresy
had been published. This photo was just a pictorial echo of a text, of a novel, of more than 600 pages soaked with passion, spiritual, experiences, discoveries and travels through space and time.
Recently I gave a title to this picture.
The title is the Portrait of Doriana Gray.
What I am doing here by introducing a title is contextualizing the visual,
as the text start to rule over pictorial content, the textual frame becomes as important as the picture.
What I am doing here by introducing a title is forcing you to see my picture in a certain way, devoid you of freedom of interpretation, destroy naive openness of the artwork.
What I am doing here is to invite you to play with meaning, to make fun, but under conditions set by the host.
I want you to see some tracks which I did in post-production like the effect which was put over the apple to show the contrast between skin and peel, between artificial smoothness of the face and the cracked apple covered by paint like it would be in fact painting, the art itself, or perhaps the portrait of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wild.
I am setting you off to discover that path of associations. The effect of cracked paint is like the visual agent of the title.
Doriana may look at the apple as Dorian was looking at his portrait, yet they both believe in their permanent youth and beauty though can see first marks of decay.
The title and the post-production effect are like a frame of the picture,
but this frame is important as the work itself.
It is so different to what for example Greek philosophers believed in.
The frame was for them the parergon what in the ancient Greek means "beside or additional to work". For Greek philosophers, this notion was not actually of great importance. In general, they were looking for the essence, not for random, specific features which were just like additions, like a frame for a picture.
But the essence may be interconnected with the parergon, and the real meaning is somewhere in between them.
Jean Jaques Derrida, the famous French postmodern Philosopher, explains that when looking at the work the frame is part of the wall, and yet when looking at the wall it is part of the work. Refused by each to be considered as part of themselves the frame exists between the two, as a separate entity.
Derrida said about the parergon in his book The Truth in Painting (I had a pleasure and pain to translate some fragments of that book into Polish) following words: “Neither work (ergon) nor outside the work (hors d’oeuvre), neither inside nor outside, neither above nor below, it disconcerts any opposition but does not remain indeterminate and it gives rise to the work.” As Ally Mc Ginn noticed, the function of the parergon, then, is to create a framework that contextualises (and re-contextualises) what is being framed. The parergon is both a literal framing or placement and a metaphysical concept that denotes context, both of which can be understood and used by the artist and the viewer (https://www.allymcginn.com/research-blog/2017/10/17/research-derrida-and-the-frame).
