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 will reveal itself. Many painters return to the same subject for years. Beneath that repetition 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 brief, electric moment when perception feels alive. It comes without warning, and it leaves as soon as one becomes aware of it. These moments are what the painter chases, 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 doesn't misdescribe an object; 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 pushing outward, into the surrounding world, the paper catching the vibrations where the two pressures meet.

Such an encounter needs devotion, and devotion requires privacy. One must close the door. There is no room for witnesses to this kind of looking. The fragile tension collapses under the gaze of a spectator.

Writing about painting feels like a betrayal. It freezes the experience into language and tries to pin down a sensation that resists being named.



The paintings themselves insist, more than words ever could, that something shifted under the pressure of looking.