By Shelby A. Winter
“Interpretation is the revenge of the intellectual upon art.”
Susan Sontag
On November 6th, 2019, Antonia Comi displayed her artwork at Florence University of the Arts (FUA), an American University in Florence, Italy. As a novice art writer, I chose to attend this show blind, hoping to simply see the walls of paintings and drawings without being influenced by too much information on the artist and the intentions behind her artwork.
I was eager to see how the first impact would make me feel, hoping to get a raw sense of the work without too many layers of subjective interpretation diluting my initial impression.
Once inside the exhibit, different mediums of art were clearly organized and grouped by content – a room for landscapes, a room for painted portraits, and a room for graphite portraits. The portraits hung in the small space were aesthetically pleasing, but on this busy evening one piece of artwork in particular stopped me in my tracks.
“Gris-eye.” An oil painting on canvas, with no frame or glassing – an aspect that made this work much more immersive than the others. I felt like one could fall and disappear within the grays and blacks surrounding the work’s central figure, the eye of David – the famous statue made by Michelangelo. There weren’t any reflections from overhead lights bouncing from the glass into my vision, and the matte grey background pulled me in. I could not see the other viewers walking around the room behind me reflected in the painting, instead it felt like I was alone with the painting, displayed without a frame, ready to really be observed.
The painting’s dark edges and undereye shadow were gripping, mesmerizing. The matte background lit up differently, simultaneously absorbing and reflecting the viewer’s mood. The cut-out of the iconic statue’s eye, felt full of compelling emotion, jumping up at the viewer despite the lack of color, casting shadows on the rest of the canvas, recalling something familiar. It felt like this small part of the statue was empathetic towards human pain and yearning.
Even without a full face to help the viewer contextualize, the artist used shadows and the matted deep-grey background to successfully create an empathetic work of art, highlighting what many would say is one of Michelangelo’s most beautiful works of art. This ‘window to the soul’, if you will, is full of feeling, without being too “busy” or colorful. This painting requires one to experience it, living within it for more than a moment in order to appreciate it, as it is not music on paper, but rather it creates a sentiment of quiet thought, of self-reflection. Viewer and painting shaping each other, and creating something new.
After looking at the painting for long enough, the eye and the background begin to merge and stand out as one. Born of the same gris tones, they whisper a conversation just quiet enough to be heard, but not understood. Lacan argues that all art, the work of fantasy and reflection, serves as a “trap for the gaze.” Observing a picture is like entering a new, symbolic world, which one must then piece together in order to visualize oneself in relation to it.
Metaphorically, the artwork serves as a mirror, and the viewer becomes a baby once again, speculating on how they fit into this world of symbols, on where their individuality comes into play within the fantasy world in front of them. Looking into the “Gris-eye”, one has the feeling of being watched by it, as a viewer, author, and subject all at once.
After this experience, I grabbed a program to learn more about the artist and look at printed replications of her artwork. Antonia Comi is an Italian painter born in Friuli, in the North-East of Italy. She studied classical drawing and painting at the Angel Academy of Art in Florence with Michael John Angel and Jered Woznicki. In her works, Comi is highly influenced by realist painters from the 19th and 20th centuries, and currently teaches drawing and painting at FUA-AUF.
Comi’s art displays her passion for classical training and her works are particularly stimulating as one flips through the program for the exhibit; the portraits easier to focus on than they were in the busy gallery setting.
“Gris-eye” was something different in the flesh, leaping quietly from the wall, personal and yet removed. In the program, a first look likely would not have had the same impact; but, without knowing exactly what Comi intended, or how she felt about her completed creation, this artwork trapped my gaze.Many artists have painted the statue of David, taking just his eye or nose as a subject; this concept is not necessarily something new, but Comi did something special with her art. “Gris-eye” struck me, pacifying the environment working so hard to distract my senses, and spoke. After I took it for what it was, I realized it was likely because I saw my own story reinterpreted through another’s work of art. In her novel, El Nervio Optico, Maria Gainza poses, “Isn’t all artwork—or all decent art—a mirror? Might a great painting not even reformulate the question what is it about to what am I about?”