the family dinner after a night in jaïl, 2020: a reading in seven lenses
Acrylic on canvas, 65 × 90 cm (25 ⅝ × 35 ⅜ in). Painting by Yiğit Özen.
At a Glance
Green has wrapped everything, three heads float within this colour; all three issue from the same mass and mix back into it. The one on the left is the lightest and most luminous, almost phosphorescent, its eye sockets hollowed. The one in the middle is small, its head coiled upon itself like a screw, standing between the two large presences with nowhere to flee. The one on the right leans forward, looking down. This arrangement of three figures is the basic construction of the family portrait, the distance between them a kinship distance. But while the title speaks of an evening meal the table is erased; no table or plate is discernible in the middle, nor is there anything to eat visible. What remains is only those who have sat down to that meal. A night spent in prison adds a layer of crime and judgement to the scene, yet who lay inside is unclear.
None of the faces looks at another; the left one forward, the middle one inward, the right one down. The gazes do not cross but they meet upon the small figure in the middle, like a child staring at its plate knowing everyone is speaking of it. The state's touching of a citizen concerns not that citizen alone; a door is knocked, someone is taken, the rest wait by the telephone until morning. The punishment targets a single person but bills the whole household; though the paper is cleaned the memory is not. What the child at home sees that night becomes its first relationship with authority, and the years that follow are built upon this acquaintance. No one speaks; to ask what happened seems like an accusation, and never to ask seems like indifference, and because both roads are wrong silence is chosen, and lasts for years.
None of the three bodies has feet; below the waist they come undone and end as they turn into dark navy pools, rising up and leaving impossible. In Japanese ghost paintings the vanished leg is a rule of belief; here the vanishing is no rule, but the brush not insisting below. Wherever the white bodies mix into the green the transition is soft, a blurred zone of a few centimetres between the two tones; with acrylic this runs only in a single fast wet session. The whole surface reads as underwater, there is no such thing as skin, the bodies are as green as the ground. Light seeps through the figures but reaches nowhere. In the upper right corner a blue field emerges from beneath the green, and the signature is scratched there with a dry, jagged tip; it is the one sharp mark left outside all this softness.
Form and Composition
Three heads, arrayed at three different heights, trace an arc drooping downward, and this arc becomes the load-bearing geometry of the composition. The three body strips descending from beneath each head set up a bundle that opens at the top and closes at the bottom, and the dark masses gathered in the lower half pull the weight downward.
Three heads stand at three different heights. The left one is highest, a finger's width short of the top edge; the right one a little lower; the middle one at a level close to the exact half of the painting. If these three points are joined, an arc drooping downward emerges. This arc is the load-bearing geometry of the composition. No symmetry is set up, because the middle head sits not at the centre but about two fifths of the way in from the left, and the distances on its two sides are not equal.
A body descends from beneath each head. The body on the left is the longest, going like an uninterrupted strip along the left edge all the way to the bottom edge and ending below in a horizontal lump. Its width is almost constant from top to bottom, that is, it works like a column. The middle body is shorter and winding; it changes direction twice, first left then right. The body on the right is the widest, spreading below and filling the lower right region. The intervals between the three strips are wide at the top and close at the bottom. There is the order of a bundle that tightens downward.
The dark masses gather in the lower half. The two dark voids in the lower centre and lower left are almost close to black and read like the space between figures' legs. The edges of these dark patches are soft, none of them has a line. In the upper half, meanwhile, the value is close to uniform, a mid-dark area continuing. The weight is thus pulled downward and the heads above stay light.
There is no such thing as a contour. All the forms come out through the light patch rubbing against the dark patch, and every edge is blurred. The distinction between figure and ground collapses most at the shoulder level of the right figure; there the light mass disperses to the side and drops to the same value as the back area. The left side of the left figure is similar, its outer line melting inward from the left edge, and where it ends cannot be read.
In the upper right corner there is a small mark set down by hand, with a narrow light-value area beneath it. That corner is different from the rest of the painting; there the ground opens all at once and stands like a window towards the edge. In terms of scale comparison, that small mark is the smallest unit in the whole painting. The eye's route begins at the left head and descends along the column, stops at the lump on the bottom edge, crosses to the right and skips over the dark void, and climbs up along the outer line of the body on the right. The verticals dominate, and horizontal force is almost entirely absent. The only horizontals are the stretch of the lump in the lower left corner and the band where the body in the lower right spreads. Both stand near the bottom edge and bind the painting from below. The distances between the top edge and the heads differ: a finger on the left, almost half a canvas in the centre, two fingers on the right. These differing distances leave the upper band like an irregular comb. The only mass approaching the edges is the one on the left; the other two stay inside, and between them and the right edge stands a hand's width of ground strip.
Colour and Light
Apart from the palm-sized turquoise field in the upper right corner the whole of the surface turns within a single green family from grass to olive, and the narrow range is saved from monotony by the opening of the value. A white, green mixed into milk, was laid onto the ground while wet, and since the boundaries stay blurred the light seeps out from within the figures but dies out before reaching anywhere.
The only place that steps outside the green is the upper right corner. There is a turquoise field there about the size of a palm, sliding a little towards cyan, cooler than everything else. Apart from that the whole of the surface turns within a single colour family: grass green, emerald, bottle green, a dark green that drops to olive towards the edges. That a painting hemmed into so narrow a colour range does not still look monotonous comes from the value being opened as wide as it will go. The white of the figures is not pure. A cold and dull lightness, as if green had been mixed into milk. The place where it is thickest is the top of the head on the left; there the paint is opaque and almost paper white. As one descends the same white thins, absorbs the green beneath it, and at the end of the arm turns into a mint colour. The white of the figure on the right, on the other hand, is bluer from the start, close to silver.
The white was laid onto the green while wet. Its edges are for this reason nowhere definite; the two colours have flowed into one another, and half-centimetre blurred bands have formed between them. This softness makes the boundary of the figures indistinct, and the bodies look as though they are emerging from the ground. Only in a few places, especially at the shoulder height of the figure in the centre, is the white set thick and a hard edge left there. The darkness is carried by navy. In the lower half, between the figures and in the gaps of the legs, there are dark areas that reach almost to black; but these are not black, they look to have been got by mixing blue into green, there is still colour within them. The depth of the surface is there. These darknesses behave like shadow, only they have no direction; from which side they fall is not clear, they merely fill the space between the figures.
The ground itself has not been laid all of one piece either. At the upper edge the green is dark and matte, in the centre it suddenly opens and rises to acid green, at the right edge it darkens again. These rises and falls leave a patchy atmosphere behind the figures. The same green, where it lightens, approaches the white of the figures, and there the boundary of the bodies disappears altogether. There is no warm colour at all. At the middle left there is a light green region verging on yellow, the warmest point is there, but even that cannot be counted as warm. Because of this the whole surface reads as though underwater; the colour of a light behind aquarium glass. There is no such thing as skin, the bodies of the figures are as green as the ground.
The light seems to come from within the figures. Around the head on the left the green opens and softens towards white; the paint there has been rubbed outwards and left an imitation of illumination. The same thing repeats on the head of the figure in the centre at a smaller scale. The ground, by contrast, is illuminated nowhere; the light seeps but reaches nowhere. Into the turquoise at the upper right a dark blue signature has been thrown, its edges cut hard and left in a single stroke of the brush.
Iconography, Myth and Title
The three heads whose table has been erased carry the construction of the family portrait, and the void placed at the centre takes the narrative and the speaking upon itself. While the night in prison in the title adds a layer of crime, the figure whiter and more phosphorescent than the others stands like a return or a memory waiting on the threshold.
Three heads float within the green. The one on the left is the lightest in colour; its head elongated, eyes and a nose can be made out on its face, the place of the mouth uncertain. The one in the middle is smaller, its head like a spiral curled over itself; inside it a single dark point takes the place of the eye. The one on the right stands most upright, its face looking down and its body widening downward from the shoulders. All three bodies unravel below the waist and merge into the dark green voids. All three mouths are closed.
The coming together of three figures in this way is the basic construction of the family portrait. One in front, one to the side, one in the middle; the distance between them is the distance of kinship. The title speaks of an evening meal, but no table is visible. There is neither table nor plate nor food. The meal itself has been erased, and what remains is only those who sat down to that meal. Something similar happens in mourning paintings; the object at the centre is removed and the posture of those around it carries the narrative. The void placed at the centre takes the speaking upon itself as well.
A night spent in prison is spoken of. This inevitably adds a layer of crime and judgement to the scene. But who lay inside is not clear. The colour of the left figure is different from the others; whiter, more luminous, almost phosphorescent. The one kept apart may have returned. Or may have been lost, and only its memory may have sat down at the table. In folk tales the person returning home stays half-visible for a while, waiting on the threshold in that brief interval between the dead and the living. In such stories a night spent inside is reckoned to be worth a long time spent outside.
None of the faces look at another. The left one looks forward, the middle one inward, the right one down. To tell how silence looks at the family table, fewer signs than these would suffice. There is no speaking, no gaze, no contact; but all three emerge from within the same green mass, that is, they cannot be separated either. The bodies merging into one another below binds this visually as well. In the lower part it cannot be told which leg belongs to whom. The absence of the exchanged gaze shows not that the bond is broken but that it has become unspeakable.
Although colour alone carries no meaning, the dark voids that open within this green area matter. In the middle and at the lower right there are two large dark hollows, settled between the bodies. The darkness beneath the table is, in family narratives, the place where the unspoken thing stands. In the upper right corner there is a small mark, placed on a blue area; it stands like the only thing that does not belong to the scene. What it is cannot be read, it has stayed like a seal added afterward. The green that opens above the three figures darkens upward and closes off a room without a ceiling.
Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious
The three beings melt into the green and merge with one another, and there is no boundary showing where anyone ends. The small figure in the middle has closed over itself and has nowhere left to flee; although no one looks directly, all the tension gathers upon it, and the fact that there is nothing to eat in the meal scene enlarges this emptiness too.
The long face on the left melts and flows downward, and where its chin ends is not clear. Three beings have gathered side by side, and none of them has a solid body. They emerge from the green and merge back into the green. No boundary showing where they end has been drawn. The difference between being together and merging into one another has been erased here. The most troubled state of the thing we call family is perhaps like this too; not being able to know where anyone ends. The bodies of all three lengthen downward, thin out, and enter the darkness. They have no feet. For this reason it is not possible for them to get up and leave either.
The figure in the middle is smaller than the others. Instead of opening, its head has curled inward; it has taken on a closed form recalling the hollow of an ear. Its face does not look outward. Between the two large beings, right in the middle, it stands with nowhere to flee. The one on the left is turned towards us, while the one on the right has bowed its head and sagged downward, towards the one in the middle. The gazes do not intersect but meet upon the middle figure. There is something here like a child seated at the table who looks at their plate knowing that everyone is speaking about them. The fold above its head could be a tuft of hair, but it stands more like a line closing over itself.
The eye sockets of the face on the left are hollowed out, and in place of its mouth there is a winding fold. It may be speaking, it may be silent. This uncertainty is the painting's most tense place. You feel that something unspoken is circling the room, but no one begins. The eye of the right figure is drawn too, as a single dark dot, looking down. No one looks directly at anyone. And yet there is someone being looked at, which we understand from the tension of the room. The neck of the right figure has lengthened, its head jutting well forward of its body. The bowing movement has not spread to the rest of the body, it has stayed only in the neck.
At the lower part of the bodies dark patches have opened. No legs, no chair, no table. The meal scene has its name but not its object. Nothing to eat is visible. This absence seemed meaningful to me; the reason for coming together has vanished, and only the obligation to come together remains. The dark voids below hollow out the underside of the figures, holding them in the air. The green behind is not the same density everywhere; some regions darken and swallow the figures, others open up and give them back.
The left figure's body lengthens downward and turns into a thinning arm, with a soft swelling at its tip. That extension reaches nothing, it just descends. In dreams of this kind the limbs lengthen like this, never arriving where they need to go. In the upper right, at the edge of the painting, there is a stamp left by hand. It does not come from within the scene; it stands like a signature placed there by someone looking at it. Apart from that there is no sharp detail, everything has softened and scattered.
Society, Power and Technology
This evening meal laid without a table tells how the state's touching a citizen charges the bill to the whole household, and how even the acquitted man cannot return to his neighbourhood in his former state. The child in the middle, who bows its head the most, comes to know authority through fear, and what it sees that night settles into its next forty years.
Three figures stand, but there is no table between them. A strange lack for a title that speaks of an evening meal. On the left a tall one, its head bare, its face sunken; in the middle a smaller one whose head has dropped forward; on the right one bent forward, looking down. All three stand close to one another, none of them touching another. This is how the homecoming goes for a person who has spent a night in custody. The table is laid, the food is set out, no one eats.
The state's touching a citizen concerns not only that citizen. The door is knocked, someone is taken, the rest wait by the phone until morning. Who is to be called, where a lawyer is to be found, which acquaintance is to be brought in; these calculations are made in one night and never forgotten again. The penal system targets a single person, charges the bill to the household. Word reaches the workplace, the neighbour hears, it is talked about at the child's school. In legal texts there is no counterpart to this, but in real life this is the longest-lasting part of the punishment. Even the man who is acquitted cannot return to his neighbourhood in his former state. The paper is cleaned, the memory is not. To have been taken once means that you can be taken again, and that possibility settles into the house.
The faces are worn. Where the eyes should be there are dark hollows, the mouths sagging downward. The bodies of all three flow downward, thinning towards their feet. These bodies look as though they have no strength left to speak. Families cannot manage to speak at such moments in any case; to ask what happened resembles an accusation, not to ask resembles indifference. Because both options are wrong, silence is chosen, and the silence lasts for years. The relation of the family as an institution to the state becomes visible right here. The harm suffered outside cannot be made good by anyone inside, but everyone is held obliged to make it good. The bill always lands in the same kitchen.
The figure in the middle is the smallest and the one that has bowed its head the most. Its being there is a separate matter. The child too witnesses what goes on in the house, and what it sees that night becomes the first relationship it forms with the state. No one tells it anything, everyone supposes it does not understand, whereas it understands all of it. The next forty years of a person who has first come to know authority through fear are built upon this acquaintance. The story of most of the adults who slow their step when they see someone in uniform begins with an evening like this.
The back surface has wrapped everything, the figures look as though they are emerging from the ground, no such thing as a room can be made out. No wall has been drawn, and there is no window. We do not know where they are, we only know that they are together. The hands of the figure on the right hang down and seem to be clasped in front of its body, just like the stance taken while waiting somewhere.
Art History and Comparison
In Carrière's mother-and-child scenes the dissolving mixes the figures into one another and establishes intimacy; here all three figures dissolve, but because of the green void between them the dissolving does not bring them closer, it separates them. Whereas in Japanese ghost painting the vanishing leg is a rule of belief, the footlessness of the three figures here is not a rule, but the brush's not insisting further down.
On the left there is a long, hairless head, its hand gone up towards its mouth, its body thinning downward and turning into a column. In the middle a small being, its head coiled like an auger. On the right the third is bent forward, looking down with a face resembling a beak. All three are half-transparent, the greenery behind them passing through their bodies. The title said family meal; yet there is no table, no plate, no chair. All the furniture of the family-portrait tradition has been thrown out, and what remains is merely three people being present in the same frame.
To dissolve the figure within mist was Eugène Carrière's sole concern at the end of the nineteenth century. In his mother-and-child scenes the faces emerge from the haze, the edges dissolve, and the family bond is established precisely through this dissolving; because it is unclear where one ends and the other begins, intimacy is felt. Here the same technique works in the opposite direction. All three figures dissolve but do not mix into one another, a green void standing between them. The dissolving does not bring them closer, it separates them.
We see such half-transparent beings in the history of painting in Japanese ghost paintings too. In the yūrei depictions linked to Maruyama Ōkyo the upper body of the figure is drawn, the legs disappear downward, and the dead person loses its bond with the ground. None of the three figures here has feet, their bodies turning into a dark pool below and ending there. The difference is a matter of intention. In Japanese painting the vanishing leg is the rule of a belief system, it says the ghost does not belong to the earth. Here the vanishing is not a rule, but the brush's not insisting further down.
Within the series' 2020 group this work stands as an exception. In the other canvases of the same year the bodies were built with bubbles, hard edges, large claws; here no edge is hard, the paint has spread wet on wet, and the cell logic is not visible. It is as though the artist were trying two separate methods in the same period and chose the wet one in this canvas. That a family scene should be built with such a method is also meaningful; that who is who remains uncertain fits a meal that has taken place at night, in prison.
The classical rule of the group portrait is that who sits where is the narrative itself. In Degas's Bellelli family the father's standing at the back, the daughters at the front, tells the whole story. In this canvas too there is an arrangement, the one on the left large, the one in the middle small, the one on the right leaning; but it is hard to draw a story out of this arrangement. Whether the difference in size is a difference in age, or merely the measure the brush found at that moment, the painting does not say. One of the matters twentieth-century figurative painting inherited was being able to bring a figure into existence without making it recognisable. For centuries the portrait was a contract of identity; the painter knew whom he was painting, and the viewer recognised him. Here none of the three faces carries an identity, yet all three have eyes and all three look in a different direction. The only thing left of identity is the direction of the gaze. In the upper right corner a blue field has opened and the signature has been placed there; it is the only sharp mark not seen in the rest of the painting.
Material, Gesture and the Viewer's Experience
There is almost no sharp edge; the soft transitions where the white bodies mix into the green suggest that the greater part of the surface was worked fast in a single wet session. While the screen spoils these blurred transitions with its own grain and shows the surface rough, on the wall it soaks into the canvas and flattens; because the eye seeks an edge to hold on to, looking a long while tires you.
I tried to look for a sharp edge and found almost none. Everywhere the white bodies mix into the green the transition is soft; the paint there was mixed while wet and a few centimetres of intermediate zone was left between the two tones. Doing this with acrylic is laborious, the material sets within minutes and after that moment dragging gives a scratch, not softness. So the greater part of this surface was worked in a single wet session, fast and without stopping. Or the drying of the paint was delayed; I see the result, I do not know the method.
The green ground is built up as patches. Dark in places, light in places, the borders between them blurred. A broad brush roamed crosswise and lengthwise, softening the edge of the previous patch at each pass. At the upper right a blue area comes out from beneath the green; that is an earlier layer and its top was not fully covered. On the left edge there is a vertical band, the green thinned there and the cold white primer beneath still reads faintly. Nowhere on the ground does the grain of the canvas weave come to the fore; the paint filled the weave and left a flat surface.
The dark navy pools below are the densest paint in this picture. There the pigment is thick, there is no transparency, and the brush marks too are erased; perhaps with a soft-bristled brush, perhaps flattened by being passed over once more before it began to dry. Their edges again are blurred, opening towards the green like a mist. The white highlights inside the bodies, on the contrary, came down in a single pull from a loaded brush; along the outer line of the left figure's arm the white descends unbroken, as a strip about half of ninety centimetres long, and gathers at its tip and ends.
In the region where the faces are the tempo changes again. There a fine-tipped brush went in, seeking the eye sockets, the nose, the mouth with curved and short lines. These lines are sunk into the wet white beneath; where pressed they split the paint and showed what was under it. The dark dot inside the eye of the figure at the upper right is a single touch and the white around it has swallowed it all around. The signature in the upper right corner, on the other hand, stays outside all this softness; dry, hard and jagged, it looks as if it was scratched onto the blue afterward.
A sixty-five by ninety canvas; hung at eye level, all three heads line up around my own head. Looked at from a metre and a half the bodies come out from within the green. Come down to half a metre and that coming-out stops, because none of the borders holds up close, and what is left in hand is areas of wet paint running into one another. On a screen this vanishing increases still further, because the screen spoils the blurred transitions with its own grain and shows the surface rougher than it is. On the wall it is the opposite; it stands as a single whole area where the paint never swelled, where it soaked into the canvas and flattened. Looking a long while at this picture tires you; the eye continually seeks an edge and, not finding one, slips away over the surface.
Back to the family dinner after a night in jaïl
