Art for the Already Dead
Susan Sontag's Burner Phone
The Closed Door Nov. 22, 2025
AFTAD
Painting begins with an absurd premise: that if you look long enough, long past the point where ordinary seeing gives out, something in the world will reveal itself that wasn’t accessible before. Painters return to the same subject for hours, days, or years. Beneath that repetition, beneath the habit and the routine, is a belief that attention is a form of two-way engagement, and that looking, if done with enough intensity, might change the tangible, or at least alter how it meets us.
This may, in the end, be the real reason one paints: the sense that looking can transform something. Real looking assumes that intent has weight, and that outcomes can be directed if you look hard enough. Every painter knows the odd brief, electric moment when everything feels sharpened and alive. It comes without warning, and it leaves as soon as one becomes aware of it. These moments are what the painter returns to the studio, hoping to find again and again.
Looking, after all, is not passive. It is something the whole body does. You lean toward the world, press into it, and the world leans toward you. If you look long enough at anything, the separation between “what is seen” and “what is made” begins to blur. It takes years of steady work to recognize that boundary at all.
Sustained looking doesn’t settle things so much as unsettle them. Forms that seemed solid start to give way. Edges soften, leaking form into space. Painting as a physical call and response attempts to keep up with these shifting realities. A wrong mark isn’t just wrong; it throws off the balance of the whole.
When someone says a painting “has presence,” they are responding to this exchange. A painting is not a record of appearances. It is the residue of a sustained encounter in which both the external world and the painter’s internal world press into each other’s space. The deeper this shared space extends, the more the painting allows the two pressures to meet, the more alive it becomes. Giacometti’s drawings come to mind here. They read as diagrams of this phenomenon, the world leaning toward the artist, the artist leaning back, the paper catching the vibrations where the two forces meet.
Such an encounter needs devotion, and devotion needs privacy. One must close the door. There is no room for witnesses in this kind of looking. Another person’s attention changes the atmosphere instantly; the fragile tension collapses. Whatever was beginning to happen between the eye and the world pulls back into silence.
This is why writing about painting feels like a betrayal. To write is to step out of the current. It freezes the experience into language. It names what was originally sensed without words.
And yet, the paintings themselves insist that something took place. The scraped passages, the buried decisions, the small corrections pressed into the surface, they all testify to a real event. Something changed under the pressure of looking.
Painters devoted to looking, embrace the fact that this negotiation never ends, that it is mostly private, and that only a small part of it can ever be spoken aloud. Painting is where these things take on weight. Attention thickens into matter. Silence gathers enough form to be seen. The unsteady quality of the world becomes visible.