🏴Jean Paul Sartre tells a story about a young boy peeping through a keyhole on the top of a stairway in an existential Parisian apartment block. The boy enjoys the view through the keyhole. It is not a shared experience, just the boy & what we imagine is catching his eye beyond the keyhole. Something sexual. Something beautiful. Disrobing. Naked. Or none of the above. Maybe the desire to look without others looking at him look. Voyeurism. Who knows. Then suddenly the boy hears hollow steps on the stairs behind him. His desire is lost in the fear & shame of being caught looking. Shame is kind of a terrible lie. Sartre’s theory of the gaze is about the gaze of the other; Jacques Lacan’s theory of the gaze is about the gaze of the fetishished object, a linguistic labyrinth that I will not enter right now, if I haven’t already. Sartre’s story is perhaps exorcised from personal experience. As a young boy Sartre discovered, not through his own gaze, but his mother’s horrified gaze - after she cut his beautiful blond locks as a child - that he was terribly ugly. Seems made up. A metaphor. Of course his mother knew his face under the blond veil. If we continue with the metaphor, the lie, we could say Sartre’s long blond hair was the lie, & his one good eye out of a set of two bad ones, was also the lie, the peephole through which the world is experienced & judged.

Alessandro Rabottini characterises Cluj School painter, Victor Man, “partial”. In psychoanalysis partiality & preference are the peep holes through which you view the whole. I think art does the same, what many might define negatively as voyeurism, but what I have come to think of positively as love. Love being something you are quite particular about, unless you are on Instagram.

📸 Victor Man, Untitled (Shaman Il), 2008, oil on canvas mounted on wood, 45 × 30 cm