No doubt, we live the era of images. From the theological way of thinking of the Middle Ages, we moved on to the Renaissance’s transformative and anthropocentric representation to be led to the pagan vertigo of the twentieth century and the impending online globalization.
It might be worthwhile to examine how the worldview of each society changes in each transition. Understanding the way the ordinary man manages the image is the key to see how he interprets his daily life.
Naturally, the way of seeing today is different than in previous eras. What we observe today is that the process of the gaze has changed radically. The gaze isn’t fixed anywhere. The volume of the photos is too dense. The eye has imposed itself, detached from senses, thoughts, spirituality, and has become the absolute sovereign. It scans shapes, figures, colors, concepts and emotions with the only intention of locating them. In other words, its aim is to certify the making and that’s all. But could the eye be the only and absolute beneficiary of visible reality, the receiver who is able to “speak” to us about reality in the most genuine way?
With the advent of modernism, art deconstructed the image of direct representation using more abstract shapes, while contemporary art started to be non-iconic, aiming to activate as many sensors as possible beyond the eye’s reach, in order to experience a more complex reality, a new experience.
It became all the more clear that painting, photography and all the other arts are tools that can replace the ultimately inconceivable reality and speak of it in a more complete way. Thus, we have the following oxymoron: the huge volume of images that shows repeatedly reality and act horizontally on an endless surface is in opposition to the vertical energy of the works that desire the living matter of things. This vertical character of actions that have a different goal and are disproportionate in quality and quantity seems to be schizophrenic.
For the first time in history, the image has been completely deconstructed, has lost its magical properties, has been ridiculed as never before and used by all preachers of modernity. At the same time, it has been deified, exploited and has become a panacea of communication.
The pause we are experiencing today due to the confinement, in combination with the extent of this phenomenon and its duration, makes me believe that the image will change dramatically in the coming years. Something has happened that, after a long lethargy, has shifted the interest of the general public to a persistent observation of the familiar space leading, inevitably, to an introversion.
“Eternal everydayness” is no longer so compact but it is changing into a slippery and flowing shift to the uncertain, under conditions that prevent the safety nets of the past that were artificially established. The illusion of a digital time that is constantly transformed into anything, with its binary but also abstract nature – a cartoonish deity – and without the matter that presupposes death, leads us to two possibilities: either our assimilation by the microcosm and its quantum nature or the consolidation of the human measure.
Do not forget that, at some point, Odysseus left Calypso’s protection – but also the idea of an eternal youth that could provide him with security and everything he wanted – and chose the path of decay and death, due to unbearable nostalgia.
Ίδωμεν (we’ll see) …the image will show our will.
