duality of the angelic summarization, 2019: a reading in seven lenses
Acrylic on canvas, 65 × 90 cm (25 ⅝ × 35 ⅜ in). Painting by Yiğit Özen.
At a Glance
Two arms are flung to either side and the two hands are not the same. The right one is darkened, almost burnt, its fingers turned to a claw and sharpened and hanging down; the left one is pale, furred, a soft heap close to a wing. The two extensions issuing from the same body seem to belong to two separate beings, with one you are caressed, with the other seized. This stance, arms flung to either side, is the standard pose of the praying figure in early Christian painting, and the arc behind marks off its sacred zone. But that template equalises the two hands, because prayer is made in one direction. The duality of the title works precisely here, by breaking the place the template equalises. In most narratives the guardian angel and the angel that takes your life are the same being; here both the one who decides and the one who executes are bound to the same body.
The idea of extracting a summary in the title is power's favourite work. A complex matter is reduced to a single sentence, dropped into the evening bulletin, and split in two as good and bad; when the detail is removed the sides have nothing left to say to each other. Beneath the beard the mouth is not visible, the figure does not even speak, it speaks by its stance. The eyes are half closed and slid down, a gaze looking upon the crowd from above. And the crowd is at the skirts of the body, in small skeletons drawn with fine white lines; chair or pole, what they are is unclear, their numbers many and all of them minute. This difference of scale automatically shrinks the viewer, you enter the scene at a child's height. Among them there is not a single human figure; what is drawn as a mass has no name, only a magnitude.
A yellowish-green robe fills the middle from top to bottom, between lemon and pistachio, plenty of white mixed in; the brush has dragged dry, and from the gaps the blue beneath seeps up in thin strips and keeps the yellow from staying warm. The background is held blue, a light ultramarine arc about the head darkening to night blue as it descends. The beard is the thickest paint of the painting; the flat brush fanned from top to bottom, at the tips the hairs split into fifteen or twenty strips. The hands are the most quickly made place, the brush giving all five fingers at once. Toward the bottom edge the mass grows one with the texture of the ground and melts, not treading the floor. One reading brings the difference of the two hands to the fore and counts the body divided, another says the two feed from the same body and refuses to separate them; the painting leaves the tension unresolved.
Form and Composition
A broad triangle spreads its base along the bottom edge and gathers its apex at head level, filling three quarters of the surface. While the roughly one head's length height difference between the two arms tilts the painting anticlockwise, the vertical hatching of the body blends into the ground at the bottom edge and melts the mass without letting it press onto the floor.
A broad triangle spreads its base along the bottom edge, its apex gathering at head level. The base runs almost the whole length of the edge, and the apex is a quarter of the way down from the top. This mass fills three quarters of the painting, and the area outside it gathers only in the four corners. The upper two corners are dark, the lower two at mid-value; the void is not distributed equally, being heavier at the top.
The head is not exactly at the centre. It has shifted a palm's width to the left of the vertical axis and stands tilted forward. The face area is the highest-contrast region of the painting, and the mass of dark hair and beard around it frames it. This frame is irregular; on the left side the strokes fringe outward and enter the ground, and on the right side they stay more compact. Behind the head, within the dark ground, there is a lighter curve, rising from both sides and closing at the top. The curve does not centre the head, widening to the right.
The two arms set up a horizontal force, but not at the same level. The right arm rises slanting upward, its hand going almost to touch the right edge, the fingers drooping down. The left arm is lower, below the horizontal; its hand spills outside the left edge and the crop cuts it. The height difference between the two hands is about one head's length. This difference turns the painting slightly anticlockwise. The shoulder line, too, is tilted in the same direction.
The inside of the body is filled with vertical strokes. The strokes descend from top to bottom, of differing lengths, with the ground showing between them. This vertical hatching gives the body weight and continues towards the bottom edge without thinning. The outer line of the mass is a smooth curve on the left side and stepped on the right; in the lower right region there is an inward indentation from the edge, and there the ground pushes into the body.
In the lower region there are small units made with thin white lines. One in the lower left, one in the lower centre, two in the lower right. All are built from a vertical bar and a horizontal connector, their length about a tenth of the body. They stand as if scratched onto the surface, above the mass rather than beneath it. The same thin white line appears once more on the right edge of the body, where it has left a rectangular piece. The distinction between figure and ground is clear above and collapses below. Near the bottom edge the texture of the body becomes the same as the texture of the ground and the boundary disappears; the mass does not press onto the floor but melts downward. The same melting is present at the tips of the two hands, the fingers fringing and scattering into the ground. In the upper right there is a small signature; it stands a finger's width in from the edge, with no other mark around it, and a wide void remains between it and the nearest mass. The eye's path starts from the face and goes to the right arm, stops at the hand and drops down, descends to the bottom edge with the vertical hatching of the body and returns from the hand on the left; the route traces an arc and does not go outside.
Colour and Light
Because blue strips seep from beneath the yellow green of the robe in the centre the colour cannot warm, and the dirty green band around it brings the robe together with the blue of the ground without a collision. Although the yellow green and the blue purple stand at opposite ends, because both are brought down from saturation it is depth and not tension that is born, and the robe moves to the front.
A yellowish green robe fills the centre from top to bottom. Its colour is between lemon and pistachio, plenty of white mixed into it, in some places turned to cream. The brush has rubbed from top to bottom and the paint has not covered everywhere; the blue beneath comes out through the gaps in thin strips. This seepage cools the robe, preventing it from staying warm even though it is yellow. The places where the white is thickest are the middle of the chest and the height of the right shoulder, where the paint is scrubbed up with a dry brush and raised. The background is held by blue. Around the head there is a light ultramarine like a broad arch, darkening downwards and descending to night blue at the lower edge. The two upper corners slide to purple, to aubergine; those are the darkest regions of the surface. At the right and left edges the blue dirties and turns to green, almost a swamp colour. This dirty green band stands like a way-station between the yellow green of the robe and the blue of the ground, softening the direct collision of the two opposite colours.
The face is cream and pale yellow, with an olive-black beard and hair around it. Within the beard there is not a single flat black; green, brown and navy have passed into one another, and yellow has seeped into some tufts. The eyes are a blue verging on purple and the only cool point within the face. The hands hold the same dark mixture, the hand on the right reaching almost to charcoal and, at the tips of the fingers, dissolving and mixing into blue. Yellow green and blue purple are the colours standing at the two opposite ends of the circle. Here neither is left at full saturation; white has been added to the yellow, black to the blue. Because of this the contrast makes depth instead of creating tension, the robe comes forward and the ground draws back.
The source of the light is not clear. The light blue arch behind the head stands like an illumination, but that brightness is a blue that has come out of blue; it does not strike the robe, nor does it light the face. The only real brightness on the surface is the white of the robe, and that too is directionless. There is nowhere a cast shadow, beneath the figure the blue continues without a break. The thickness of the paint changes greatly from region to region and the colour is directly affected by this. In the face and the beard the dough is thick, the colour full; at the ends of the arms, on the other hand, the paint is almost licked away, the blue beneath has swallowed the colour. The same olive green drops to black where it is laid thick and to a muddy blue where it is laid thin. The pale yellow ball on the left arm therefore stays a register lighter than the yellow in the body. In the lower region there are thin lines scratched with white over the blue; small forms resembling a chair. The paint there is very thin, the blue beneath shows throughout, and this white comes out cooler than the white in the robe. In the upper right corner there stands a mark thrown in a brownish black, only just made out against the purple.
Iconography, Myth and Title
The bearded figure standing frontally sets up the icon of the sovereign figure on the church wall, but when one hand is made of wing and the other of claw, the blessing angel and the angel who takes the soul are gathered into a single body. The unreadable white lines below recall the two-column list of the Last Judgement, and a person who does not know what is in it cannot prepare a defence.
A bearded head is seated right in the middle of the blue arch behind it. The hair is dishevelled, the beard dark and descending toward the body, the two sides of the face worked differently; the left side light, the right side shadowed. The arms reach to either side. The left hand is light-coloured, ending in furry, soft tips; the right hand is dark, close to a claw, its fingers hooked. A wide garment covers the body, the cloth flowing downward. The distance between the two hands exceeds the width of the body.
The setup settles directly onto the icon schema. The bearded figure standing frontally, the arched niche behind the head, the arms opening to either side, the wide robe. This is the posture of the sovereign figure on the church wall. But in the icon the two hands do the same work; one blesses, one holds a book. Here the hands do not resemble each other and this difference becomes the centre of the scene. One side is made of wing, the other of claw. The width of the robe hides the body; the only visible parts of the body are the hands and the face.
The title speaks of duality and confirms this distinction. Most narratives about the angel are already bipolar; the guarding angel and the angel who takes the soul are often the same being, and only the direction it comes from changes. The one coming from the right and the one coming from the left, the two sides of the ledger, the two scribes who keep the record of good and evil deeds. Here that duality has not been split into two separate figures but placed in a single body. The one who decides and the one who carries out are bound to the same body. The ledgers of the two scribes are kept apart, but the hand that holds those ledgers reaches from the same place.
The idea of drawing up a summary that appears in the title stands as strange and is meaningful for exactly this reason. The shortening of a lifetime, a case, or a reckoning. This is the work done in narratives of the Last Judgement; a long life is reduced to a single weighing. The white lines below seem to support this; they resemble letters drawn on paper or scratched-in marks, standing separately at the lower left and lower right. Two lists, two columns. They cannot be read but give the feeling that they are lists. A list that cannot be read stands heavier than one that can; a person who does not know what is in it cannot prepare a defence.
The arch itself closes the scene into a place. The blue area behind rises right above the head, darkening at the edges and turning into a wall. The figure placed in the niche ceases to be a portable image and occupies a fixed office. The expression of the face, however, is not of the expected gravity; the eyes are half-closed, the gaze slipped down, the mouth lost within the beard. It stands like a judge who does not speak. The edges of the niche narrow above the head and surround the figure in a way that leaves it unable to leave its place. The white scratches on the robe multiply as they descend and, at the hem, turn into a texture that almost resembles writing.
Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious
The two arms are as if they belonged to two separate beings; the right dark and burnt, traces dripping and staining from its fingertips, the left soft and furred. While the face, its eye sockets emptied and its mouth covered by a beard, leaves behind only an unworkable sense of a presence, the small scaffolds bring the viewer down to a child's height.
Two arms are opened to either side, and they do not resemble one another at all. The right arm is dark, almost as if burnt; its fingers lengthened, their tips hardened, hanging downward. The left, meanwhile, is light in colour, furred, a soft heap. Two extensions coming out of the same body seem to belong to two separate beings. With one it could caress, with the other seize. We do not know which will come to the fore, and this uncertainty makes it hard to stand before the figure. The length of the two arms is not equal either; the dark one is longer, descends lower. The line of the shoulders stands at a different height on each side.
The face is heavy. The eye sockets are filled with dark paint, and whether there is a gaze inside cannot be made out. The head is slightly tilted to one side, as if looking downward. Where the mouth ought to be is covered by a thick beard. The organ of speech is covered, while the organ of sight is emptied. What remains? Only a sense of a presence remains; you know it is there, you do not know what it will do to you. As a child one sometimes reads the faces of grown-ups like this, the expression cannot quite be worked out, and everything gets poured into that unworkable emptiness. Hair and beard are made with the same dark paint, encircling the face and making it smaller still.
The body is broad and unruly. No legs, below there is a spreading resembling a skirt, from there it descends and disappears. A large body without feet cannot move about, but it seems in any case to have no need to move; it has covered the whole of the scene. The dark blue dome behind wraps around the head, like a halo but a blackened halo. Sublimity and threat are gathered in the same form. The broad open area over the body is hatched with quick brush marks; whether it is clothing or skin is not clear.
Below there are small structures drawn in white lines, like scaffolding or a stand. Compared with the large body they are very small. This difference in scale automatically shrinks the viewer; you enter the scene at a child's height. A colossal being looking down from above, and below a world built from tiny sticks. So simple a difference in proportion sets up the whole inequality of the relation. Among those small structures there is no human figure; only empty skeletons built from sticks stand there.
From the fingertips of the dark hand on the right, dark traces drip downward. The paint may have run, but it stands where it was left, and that hand looks as though it had been soiled there. On the other hand there is no such trace. In the same body a side that stays clean and a stained side stand next to one another, and the painting has refused to separate the two. Both hands are opened at the same height, both are fed by the same body.
Society, Power and Technology
The claw and the soft hand out of the same body tell how the figure on the platform chooses which hand to show on stage, and how the summary wipes away the detail and splits society into the good and the bad. The tiny skeletons at the skirts draw the crowd as a mass, and once the number is uttered the people melt within it.
The two arms are opened to the sides and the two hands are not alike. The right one has turned into a claw, the fingers darkened and sharpened. The left is more open, softer, spread out like a feather. Two hands out of the same body. Most men who take the platform know this stance; you make the gesture of an embrace, and whoever you do not embrace is left behind you. The hand seen in the stage light is always the open one, no one wonders about the other.
The title speaks of producing a summary. The summary is power's favourite business. A complex matter is put before you, it needs six months of discussion, but it is reduced to a single sentence and that sentence drops into the evening bulletin. The good on one side, the bad on the other. The cheapest way to split a society in two is to do away with the detail of the matters; when the detail is gone, the sides have nothing left to say to one another, only shouting is left. And now the bulletin is not the only thing doing this work. We have tools in our hands that reduce a long text to three bullet points in a second, and in those three points what remains is not who said what but which side they stood on. The mind that grows used to reading summaries counts the whole text as too much work. This is why no mouth is visible beneath the beard; the figure does not even speak, it speaks with its stance.
The eyes are half closed, looking a little downward. This is a gaze that looks down from above, turned to the crowd. And where is the crowd. Below, at the skirts of the body, there are small skeletons drawn in fine white lines; they could be chairs, they could be poles. What they are is uncertain, but their number is great and all of them are tiny. Think of how the mass of people seen behind a leader is drawn in pictures; no one is drawn one by one, they are drawn as a mass. The thing drawn as a mass has no name either, it has only its size. How many people fit into the rally ground is discussed, what those people want is not discussed. Once the number has been uttered, the people melt into the number.
The body has covered almost the whole of the canvas, a thin gap left at the back. A being that does not fit the crop. That one person takes up this much room in the public arena means that the room left for everyone else to fit into shrinks. Speaking time is shared out this way too. One person speaks for forty minutes, two minutes each are left for the remaining twenty, and this distribution looks fair to everyone, because the speaking person's time is not a subject of discussion in the first place.
That the word angel stands in the title strikes me as something apart. There are no wings here, there is hair, there is a beard, and there are two hands. Who conferred the angelhood is not clear; and at the moment it is conferred, it is also decided which of those two hands will count. The hand that is a claw is still in the air, its fingers held open.
Art History and Comparison
In early Christian painting the open palms of the praying figure are equalised as the template requires; here the two hands have parted, one turned into a claw, the other feathered over and approaching a wing. Whereas painters resolved the angel's double nature with the wing, the duality here appears not as an appendage hung on the body, but like an illness that comes down upon one side of it.
A head with a jet-black beard and dishevelled hair; its arms opened to both sides, the dark blue arc behind it as though it had taken it into a cell. The hand on the right has darkened, its fingers turned into a claw; the hand on the left, though, is open and feathered, almost a wing. This stance, arms opened out to both sides and palms turned forward, is the standard pose of the praying figure in early Christian painting; the same form is repeated from catacomb walls to mosaics, and there the arc behind the figure marks its sacred space. The template stands here plainly enough to be recognised. What changes is that the two hands differ from one another. The template itself equalises the two hands, because prayer is made in a single direction.
The bearded, dishevelled, large-headed holy figure is a haunt of German Expressionism as well. In Nolde's religious paintings the apostles are coarse, flushed, peasant-faced; holiness is not refined, on the contrary it is thickened. The head here is of the same coarseness, but Nolde's figures are within a community, they look at one another, they are part of an event. There is no one around this figure. There is a kinship with Rouault's Christ heads too; Rouault would divide the face with thick black contour like stained glass, the gaze coming out from between those cages. Here there is no contour, the darkness of the face comes directly from the mass of the beard.
The lower part of the body is interesting. Below the shoulders it spreads out like a kaftan, but it is not cloth, it is whipped-up paint; where the arms connect, whether there are legs, is unclear. At the lower edge there are a few lines scratched in white, resembling a chair leg or a letter, and it is hard to say anything definite. Such scratched marks are found in other works of the series too, and generally give the impression of having been left at the last moment of the painting, before the paint dried.
The history of the depiction of angels enters the matter here too. The winged being is privileged in the tradition of painting because it always carries two natures; it descends to the earth, yet does not belong there. Painters most often resolved this duality with the wing itself, and once the wing was attached the matter was settled. The figure here has no wing, and in its place one of its hands has feathered over. That is, the duality appears not as an appendage hung outside the body, but like an illness that has come down upon one side of the body. In folk painting too there are such half-transformed beings, unnamed intermediate creatures.
Among the works dated 2019 this canvas stands in the group that treats a single figure frontally and at a fairly large size. Whereas in the room scenes of the same year the figures are placed within a space, here the space consists only of the arc behind. The cell-built bodies of the later years have not yet arrived either; here the body is still a single mass, only its edges dishevelled. The painting resolves the matter of duality in the title through the hands, not through the face. The face has stayed in a single expression, its gaze does not say to which side it belongs; one of the two eyes is inside a dark socket, the other open and seen from the side.
Material, Gesture and the Viewer's Experience
The black brush that fills the beard by fanning it out passed to the cheeks without ever being washed, smeared into the cream tone and left a grey dirt, and this was not corrected. One of the white lines on the lower edge descends to the lower margin of the canvas and is cut off without gathering, and this shows that the work was made resting against an upright surface.
The beard is where the thickest paint has gathered. The black there is not thinned, drawn downward with a flat brush, fanning out, and at the ends the bristles part from one another and split into fifteen or twenty fine strips. The pull is from top to bottom; at the starting points the paint has built up, and as it goes down it has thinned. The same brush passed to the cheeks without ever being washed, so black smeared into the cream tone at the edge of the face and a grey dirt was left there. This dirt is not corrected, no clean border was sought.
The yellowish green on the body is laid on almost dry. It was pressed and pushed onto the surface while the brush held little paint, so the blue beneath seeps through along the whole of the middle region and the two layers show at once. The direction of the dragging is not always downward, in some places it was pushed upward; where pushed upward the paint clung to the back face of the canvas weave and left a more jagged mark. In this region I count at least three passes. The blue at the very bottom, the yellowish green in the middle, and at the very top the light patches flung here and there.
The white lines on the lower edge look as if they came from an altogether different tool. The fullness of the brush is completely lost there; the marks are broken, jagged, they caught the crests of the canvas and skipped its hollows. He dragged these either with the edge of a thoroughly dried brush or with a hard tip. The paint there does not soak into the surface, it hangs on top of it. The same white is on the right shoulder too, thicker and fuller there; two different hand pressures. One arm of the white array at the lower left descends to the lower edge of the canvas and is cut off there, not gathering at the edge; so the work was made resting against an upright surface, not on the floor or a table.
The making of the hands is the fastest part. The fingers were not drawn one by one, the brush gave all five fingers at once; the gaps that appeared as the bristles parted turned into the spaces between the fingers. This is a shortcut and it is not hidden. Beneath the right hand, where the paint ran out, the line broke off in the middle, unfinished. Inside the face, meanwhile, a fine-tipped brush roamed; the navy in the eye sockets was placed while the cream beneath was still damp, its edges scattered.
The back ground, tracing an arc around the head, turns to light blue and darkens at the corners. The arc is made with a single turn of a broad brush, with no other laying inside it. Along the edge the paint overflowed a little and got into the black of the figure's hair; the blue there pushed in among the black and opened small breaches. When this sixty-five by ninety surface is hung at eye level the bearded face stays a little above my own face and I have to lift my head slightly to look. A metre away the body is a lit mass. At thirty centimetres that mass dissolves, and what is left in hand is the hundreds of broken marks the dry brush left on the cloth, and the blue ground comes back up from among them.
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