two woman figures sitting at the back of the canvas, 2019: a reading in seven lenses
Charcoal on the reverse of canvas, 65 × 90 cm (25 ⅝ × 35 ⅜ in). Painting by Yiğit Özen.
At a Glance
The stretcher bars and the central rail are visible just as they are; two female figures are drawn in charcoal on the unpainted back face of the canvas, that is the side normally left turned to the wall. To draw on a surface no one will look at is a strange decision, hidden yet carefully worked, and that the concealed thing is made with this care makes it the more laden. The charcoal is on raw, unprimed cloth, and because the stick touches only the tops of the weave and does not descend into the hollows, no line is unbroken; the body that looks full from afar becomes riddled with holes up close, as if passed through a sieve. This charcoal, finding no binder, lifts if you run your hand over it and scatters if it rubs while being carried; the painting carries the possibility of its own vanishing upon it and does not hide it.
The wooden upright in the middle is not a border the painter drew but the frame's own border, and it necessarily shuts the two figures into separate compartments; they are on the same surface but cannot see one another. The width of the rail is an arm's length, they could touch if they reached, no one reaches. Whose work is written on the back of the canvas can be asked from here too: none of the work done at home enters the national income account, and because it does not enter it is counted as nothing, the economy's largest sector visible in no picture. Two people doing the same work in two separate compartments, unaware of each other; the manner in which housework is distributed also prevents coming together and speaking. In the factory a thousand people begin work at the same bell and see one another; a thousand people working at home never see one another.
The stances are the very tradition of the studio: the seated nude, the leg stretched out, the hand going behind the nape. In those scenes the figure stands to be looked at and does not see the one looking; here both faces are turned out, the eyes open, the looked-at party turned toward the looker. The academy's condition of keeping the face calm and typeless is broken too; the body is by the rules, the head without rules, the faces crooked and the teeth visible. The figure on the left has crossed one leg over the other, its stance can be counted relaxed, but the chin is sharpened, the eyes narrowed, the face taut while the body loosens. The right one's hands vanish behind the back; they could be held, or hidden of their own will, and whether the diagonal strip crossing its body is rope or cloth is unclear, and the decision is thrown to the viewer. The back of the canvas was a serious subject in art history with Gijsbrechts, but there the back face was painted onto the front with a great illusion; here there is no illusion, the back face is really the back face and has been worked upon.
Form and Composition
The stretcher bars introduce a real grid onto the surface and divide the field into two panels, and the composition's main vertical comes not from paint but from the wooden band in the centre itself. While the seated body on the left spreads horizontally and covers three quarters of the panel, the standing body on the right fits into a narrow vertical strip, and the weight shifts to the right.
The stretcher bars introduce a real grid onto the surface. There is a band on each of the four edges and a vertical band in the centre, and these five bars divide the field into two panels. The panel on the left is a finger's width wider than the one on the right. The dividing line is not drawn but the wood itself; that is, the composition's main vertical comes not from paint but from the structure of the material. The thickness of the bars is constant and they have no shadow, so they stand not on top of the plane but inside it.
In the panel on the left there is a seated body. The hip in the lower central region, the back tilted to the right as it goes up, the head a quarter of the way down from the top. The right arm rises up and goes behind the head, the elbow making a sharp angle. The left leg stretches forward and the foot almost touches the left edge; this leg is the panel's longest horizontal. The seating unit beneath it is built from thin bars, with four legs and two horizontal rails. The legs end just above the lower bar. The contrast between the figure's slanted body and the upright bars of this unit holds the left panel up.
In the panel on the right there is a standing body. Its arms have gone back, the shoulders opened backward, the elbows leaving a triangular void on each side. The head stands a finger's width short of the upper bar. The legs break at the knee and come forward, and the feet spread on top of the lower bar. The axis of the body breaks twice from top to bottom: once at waist level to the left, once at knee level to the right. The silhouette is therefore wavy.
Neither figure sits at the centre of its own panel. The one on the left leans to the right and has left a wide void on its left side; the one on the right is in the centre but has more room on its right side. In total the void is greater in the left panel and gathers in the lower left corner. For this reason the double panel does not read as balanced, and the weight shifts to the right.
The line is dry and hatched. Volume is given with unidirectional parallel lines; in the bodies these lines follow the direction of the form, and in the seating unit they stay straight. The contour in some places thickens into a dark band, in some places is a single thin mark. The distinction between figure and ground collapses nowhere, because the ground has been left wholly empty; there are only short shadow hatchings beneath the feet, and they bind the figures to the surface. The heights of the two bodies are close to one another but not their areas. The one on the left, because it is seated, spreads horizontally and covers three quarters of the panel's width; the one on the right, because it is standing, fits into a narrow vertical strip and does not even fill half the panel. Their head levels differ too: the head on the left is far from the upper bar, the one on the right almost touches the bar. The crop cuts no limb, and both figures are completed within their own frame.
Colour and Light
The charcoal black is the only paint matter, but it reaches full black nowhere, and because of the weave of the cloth the dark areas descend to a velvety darkness that reads grey from a distance. The only chromatic colour is the honey pine brown of the wood; although its saturation is low, because there is no other colour around it, it works far above its measure.
The black of the charcoal is the only colour matter here and it reaches full black nowhere. Even in the darkest places there is grey within it; in the hair, in the legs of the chair and in the hatchings beneath the breasts, a velvety darkness that stands like dust. Because the weave of the cloth comes out through every stroke the black does not close, and light specks constantly remain between the strokes. Because of this the dark areas read grey from a distance. The ground is not white. A yellowed cream close to oatmeal; the raw cotton's own colour. It is markedly warmer than paper white, and this warmth pulls the grey of the charcoal a little towards brown. At the top and on the right edge there are a few rust patches, small and scattered; they too are of the same warm family.
The only chromatic colour is the wood itself. A light brown between honey and pine, with a vein verging on pink within it. It stands around the two panels and in the centre as a vertical band. This is the most saturated colour on the whole surface and its saturation is actually low; but because there is no colour around it, it works far above its measure. Next to the wood the cream of the cloth looks cool, whereas looked at on its own it is warm. The value range is wide but its ends are soft. The lightest point is the areas where the cloth is left empty, the darkest point the hair of the figure on the left. All the steps between them are built with overlapping lines; there is no separate tone called grey, grey is something the eye joins together from a distance. Looked at up close, only black lines and cream gaps are seen.
The tone of the two panels differs a little from each other. The one on the left is darker, because the black of the chair holds a broad area and the empty space around the figure narrows. In the panel on the right the cream is left more exposed, and the body there is hatched more lightly too. The same charcoal is left at two separate intensities on the two sides, and the wooden batten in the centre makes this difference completely plain. The light indicates a direction on the bodies. In the figure on the right the darkness is gathered along the line of the back and hip, and the front surface of the belly and legs is left light; in the one on the left there is the same arrangement, the darkness coming from the right side. That is, an imitation of illumination has been built on the bodies. Against this there is nothing on the ground; there is no shadow falling beneath the feet, the figures stand suspended over the cream. Beneath the chair on the left there are a few dark hatchings; that is the place on the surface that most recalls a shadow, but it has descended not in a direction but straight downwards.
Along the edges small dark nails are ranged over the wood. Their colour is different from the charcoal, cooler and more metallic; they stand as dots over the yellowish board.
Iconography, Myth and Title
The model poses carry the workshop tradition repeated for hundreds of years, but both figures turning their faces outward and toward the viewer breaks the rule that the gaze is one-sided. The strips passing over the bodies can turn the figure from a model into a held figure; the rope's visibility binds the scene to martyrdom, its invisibility to a portrait, and the decision has been left to the viewer.
A figure has been drawn in each of the two gaps left between the laths. The one on the left has sat on a chair; it has stretched out one leg, bent the other, and taken one arm behind its head. Across the middle of its body a transverse band passes and seems to bind its arms to its sides. The one on the right is standing; it has put its weight on one leg, both hands behind it, and a strip cutting across its body descends from shoulder to hip. Both of their faces are worked, both look outward. The wood of the laths is unpainted.
These postures are the workshop tradition itself. The seated nude, the standing nude, the stretching of a leg, the hand going behind the nape; all have been repeated among model poses for hundreds of years. In those scenes the figure stands there to be looked at and does not see the one who looks. The stretching of a leg is one of the oldest movements of seated-nude paintings. Both figures here have their faces turned outward and their eyes open. The party that is looked at has turned toward the party that looks. In model scenes the direction of the gaze is one-sided and this rule is almost never broken; here it has been broken.
The strips passing over the bodies change this relation. The band binding the left one's arms to its body, the diagonal strap passing across the right one's chest. It could be a piece of cloth, a rope, or just a line. A bound figure ceases to be a model and turns into a held figure. In images of female saints this distinction too is made with the same sign; if the rope is visible the scene passes into martyrdom, if it is not visible it stays a portrait. The visibility of a rope changes the type of the scene on its own; if it is not visible the scene stays a portrait. Here the rope has been left uncertain and the decision cast to the viewer.
The wooden frame formed by the laths places the two figures in two separate compartments. They stand on the same surface but an upright has entered between them. They cannot see each other. Two-winged altar panels have such an arrangement too; on each wing a saint stands and the division in the middle both joins and separates them. This resemblance arrives at a strange place with rough pieces of wood doing the work of a sacred frame. The upright in the middle makes the figures it separates part of the same story.
The expression of the faces is the harshest side of the scene. The eyes fallen into hollows, the mouths drawn down, the jawlines sharp. The drawing is made with charcoal and not erased; the pressed places have darkened, the lightly gone-over places have stayed pale. The back face is normally the side no one will look at; a picture standing there is made not to be shown but to be tried out. Fingerprints have stayed on the charcoal. The toes of the left figure's stretched-out leg approach the edge of the frame, while the right figure's feet stand right above the lower lath and there is no ground line.
Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious
The two figures drawn with care on the unseen back face of the canvas, hidden but worked to the end, make the concealed thing more loaded still. The wooden batten between them separates them from one another, and although they are as close as an arm's length no one reaches out and their gazes disappear on either side of the batten.
Two figures are drawn on the unseen face of the canvas, with a wooden batten standing between them. This is not the front face everyone looks at; it is the back, that is, the side that normally stays turned to the wall. To draw something in a place no one will look at is a strange decision. Hidden, but not carelessly; both bodies are worked to the end. That the hidden thing should be made with care makes it more loaded still. The lines are drawn with pressure, in some places sunk into the surface. Around the battens, though, it is empty; nothing has been drawn apart from the two bodies, there is neither a room nor a background.
The batten in the middle separates the two from one another. Each has stayed in its own compartment. They share the same surface but there is a wall between them, and this wall was not put there afterwards, it was already there. They have not turned towards one another. The one on the left has turned its head to the right, the one on the right seems to be looking left, and yet their gazes disappear on either side of the batten. To be close and unable to see one another is a more unsettling state than to be far apart. The width of the batten is about that of an arm; if they reached out they could touch one another. No one reaches out.
The figure on the left is seated on a chair, one leg crossed over the other, one arm raised above its head. Its posture could be called relaxed. Its face, however, is not so; the chin sharpened, the eyes narrowed, the mouth descended to a straight line. While the body loosens, the face has tensed. There are states in which a person tries to let themselves relax but some part of them stays on guard; the tension here has gathered exactly in the face. The underside of the raised arm is left open, one side of its chest is entirely visible; that openness is the price of the relaxed posture. The legs of the chair are thin and long, barely carrying the body.
The figure on the right is standing with its hands behind it. Its arms have passed behind its back, its palms not visible. The hiding of the hands is an interesting choice. We cannot know what they are doing, they could be bound, they could have been hidden of their own will. Its body is slightly twisted, its hip to one side, its shoulders turned to the other. A posture caught between standing in one place and fleeing from one. Its feet are drawn large, its toes distinct; too detailed compared with the rest of its body. The place that presses on the ground has become the most worked place.
Both bodies are hatched with short, hard lines; the skins are covered in scratches. These marks on the surface may have been set there to make shadow, but on a naked body they stand like scratches. Just outside the batten, at the edges, the surface has been left empty. There is no shadow either; no ground has been drawn beneath the two bodies. The foot the figure on the left extends has touched the boundary of its compartment. The feet of the one on the right, meanwhile, have stayed in the middle of its compartment, not coming near the edge; the relation each has with the boundary is different.
Society, Power and Technology
The wooden batten running down the middle shuts the two women into separate compartments; because the work done in the home does not enter the national income account it is counted as not existing, and, called love, it is left unpaid. The compartment between them ensures that a hundred women doing the same work stay behind their own walls and cannot come together, cannot write a demand.
A wooden batten runs right down the middle and shuts the two figures into separate compartments. On the left one has sat on a chair, raised one arm above its head, stretched out its leg. On the right one stands, its arms gone behind it, its body slightly turned. Both are on the same surface, but they cannot see each other. The piece of wood between them does the work of a wall.
These two women have been drawn on the side of the canvas that is not expected to be seen. The surface left facing the wall. A good starting point for thinking about whose work gets written on the back. None of the work done in the home goes on record, for instance. Cooking, cleaning, the child's homework, the old person's medicine time; none of these enters the national income account. Because it does not enter, it is counted as not existing, and because it is counted as not existing, no one is obliged to pay anything in return. The economy's largest sector appears in no table. If you had the same work done by a company an invoice would be issued, insurance paid, a day of leave defined. When it is done in the home, meanwhile, it is called love, and it is said that love has no wage. Those who form this sentence are usually the ones who do not do that work.
The compartment between them is the real matter here. Two people doing the same work, in two separate flats, unaware of each other. In a neighbourhood there are a hundred kitchens and a hundred women doing the same work at the same hour. A group of people doing the same thing at the same time would normally talk to one another, organise, write a demand. Housework makes this impossible, because everyone is behind her own wall. The way the work is distributed also prevents those who do it from coming together. A thousand people working in a factory start work at the same bell and see one another; a thousand people working at home, meanwhile, never see one another. The consequences of this difference have stood before us for a hundred years.
The stances of the two figures do not resemble each other. The one on the left has stretched out its leg, it may as well be sitting at ease; the one on the right is standing with its arms taken behind it, as if waiting. There is a posing in both of them. These are bodies used to being looked at. There is a hundred-year list of instructions on how a woman stands in the public arena, how she sits, where she puts her arm, and that list is hung nowhere, everyone knows it by heart. The price of breaking the list is not written down either; it is exacted with a look, with gossip, with a greeting withheld at the door. This is why unwritten rules are the firmest rules, they leave no text to object to.
The feet of the figure on the right are drawn quite large, planted on the ground, the toes distinct one by one. The foot the figure on the left stretches out, meanwhile, reaches towards the edge of the compartment, a few centimetres short of the wood.
Art History and Comparison
Gijsbrechts set up an illusion by painting the back of a picture onto its front; here there is no illusion, the back is really the back and has been worked on, the rejection of the painting surface being the series' most extreme freedom. In the academy the body followed the rule and the face was kept calm; here the hands are drawn one by one and the faces are deliberately distorted.
The stretcher bars and the middle crossbar appear just as they are; two female figures have been drawn in charcoal on the unpainted back of the canvas. The figure on the left is seated on a chair; one of its legs is opened forward to its full length, one arm is raised and the hand has stayed at the level of its hair. The one on the right is standing, its body twisted, with a strip coming down from its shoulder to its hip. The face of each is built with sharp angles, with a few hard strokes.
To work from the nude model was the academy's basic exercise; in charcoal, in a single sitting, one sought to catch the weight and the turn of the body. In these two figures the traces of that exercise are clear: the seated figure's hip really presses on the chair, the standing one's weight has been transferred to one leg. But the academy's second condition, that is, keeping the face calm and without a type, has been broken here. Both faces are distorted, the teeth show, the eyes have fled into their sockets. The body follows the rule, the head follows none. The place a student working from the model struggles with most is the hand, the place he most evades is the face; here both have been reversed, the hands drawn one by one, while the faces have been deliberately distorted.
This manner of distortion brings to mind the studio drawings of German Expressionism. In Kirchner's model studies the line is thrown down fast, the limbs are lengthened, the face passed over with a few angular strokes; the aim is not likeness but the hardness of the model's stance at that moment. The difference is that the shading here is more insistent. Kirchner would most often trust the contour and leave the inside empty, whereas the inside of these two figures has been hatched from top to bottom, given volume. That is, not a fast drawing, but a drawing dwelt upon.
The real matter is the surface itself. The back of the canvas had once been a serious subject in the history of painting; in the seventeenth century Gijsbrechts painted the back of a picture, together with its bars and its number label, leaving the viewer face to face with a work turned round. There the back was painted, with a great illusion, onto the front. Here there is no illusion; the back is really the back and it has been worked on. The rejection of the surface meant for painting and the use of its reverse is the extreme point of the freedom seen throughout the series. Cardboard, black paper, an A2 sheet, and then it was the turn of the back of the canvas; each time a ready surface was found and worked on.
The wooden crossbar in the middle necessarily separates the two figures from each other; it is not a boundary the painter drew, but the frame's own boundary. The two women have thus fallen into separate compartments, they do not look at each other. Among the series' 2019 works this is the piece in which human anatomy is preserved the most; while in the canvases of the same year the bodies split into bubbles, here the rib, the kneecap, the toe are each in place. The left hand of the figure on the right disappears behind its back, and there the drawing has stopped.
Material, Gesture and the Viewer's Experience
Because the charcoal works on raw cloth without primer, the stick touched the crests of the cloth's grain, the dust did not go down into the hollows but hung on the surface, and the body that looks full from a distance becomes riddled with holes as you approach, as if it had passed through a sieve. The surface is the back face of the canvas; because it is not fixed, the work carries the possibility of vanishing, of scattering the moment it is touched.
The charcoal here works on raw cloth, without primer, and this changes every line. The grain of the cloth is coarse, and as the stick passes over it touches only the crests of the loops, it does not go down into the hollows; so no line is unbroken, all are built of dots. The body, which looks full from a distance, becomes riddled with holes as you approach, as if it had passed through a sieve. Charcoal does not behave like this on paper; paper drinks the dust, here the dust hangs on top of the cloth.
Beneath the surface there are stretcher bars and these bars have directly affected the drawing. The vertical wood at the centre physically separates the two figures; where the cloth sits on the bar the ground is hard, where it is left unsupported it is springy. In the hard region the stick left more dust, the lines darkened. In the springy region the cloth went in under pressure and the mark stayed weak. On the calf of the figure on the right I can read this difference. The staples at the edges also stand as they are, their number and spacing visible. In a few places the charcoal smeared onto the wood of the bar too and was not wiped away there; the drawing did not stop at the border of the cloth.
The tones are obtained in two separate ways. The broad grey areas are made by laying the stick on its side and dragging; there there is no line one by one, only a layer of dust covering the cloth. The contours, on the other hand, are drawn with the tip of the stick and by pressing, their thickness changing according to the pressure. And there are regions crushed with the finger; beneath the breasts and on the belly the dust is spread, the gaps between the lines are closed and there the surface became smooth. The direction the finger went still reads.
This work looks as if it is not fixed. Charcoal can find no binder to hold on to over raw cloth; if you run your hand over it it comes off, if it rubs while being carried it scatters. That is, the picture carries the possibility of its own vanishing on itself and does not hide this. The few brown patches on the cloth also look as if they smeared on later, not wiped away. The lines of the chair the left figure sits on are the places pressed hardest; there the charcoal crushed the cloth and went right down beneath the weave, and those lines look more permanent than the others.
The back face of a sixty-five by ninety canvas, that is the side normally never seen. Hung on a wall the bars leave a gap of a few centimetres between the wall and the picture and the surface comes forward. Looked at from a metre and a half the two figures stand upright. Come down to half a metre and the weave of the cloth, the shadow of the bars and the staples come into play, and the figures stand not on top of a surface but behind an object. You have to suppress the urge to reach out and touch, because the moment it is touched that side does not come back. On a screen all this becomes a flat drawing; the thickness of the wood, the glint of the staple and the fragility of the dust are completely lost there.
Back to two woman figures sitting at the back of the canvas
