victim psycho-logique II : the peachy pharaoh connects with the chair, 2019: a reading in seven lenses
Acrylic on canvas, 65 × 90 cm (25 ⅝ × 35 ⅜ in). Painting by Yiğit Özen.
At a Glance
A peach-coloured body stands doubled over on a diagonal running from lower left to upper right, its heaviest mass gathered right at the level of the belly, the legs that bear it thin and long; the borne is heavy, the bearer weak. The roundness is built not by dark shadow but by warmth of colour: cadmium yellow in the middle, apricot toward the outside, salmon pink at the edge. Nowhere is there a grey shadow, no shadow gathers beneath the objects either, not a single sign of light is left. The two red points on the breasts are the most saturated patch of the body. The ground wavers between blue and purple and sets up a direct contrast with the peach body; there is no middle tone between them, the border drawn only by the figure's own pink contour.
The head is made in a quite different language from the body. The face is a rotten colour where olive green mixes with black, the eyes blank white, the mouth closed with red stitches. The striped cap on top summons the pharaoh's headdress, the nemes; but the sign of permanence is set upon the head of a collapsed body. The crown above, the body below. The horizontal stripes of the cap grow denser toward the top, the one orderly rhythm on the surface. A pink tube issuing from the mouth connects to the white chair on the right, that chair consisting of line alone, its inside not filled, an empty checked frame. The word connects in the title describes the relation exactly: there is contact, no sitting. The organ of speech is turned into an organ of carrying; it seems one must fall silent to keep up the exchange with office. That in Turkish the chair means two things works here, office stands as an empty grid and takes its power from what is connected to it.
At upper left a small hanging rabbit toy has crosses in its eyes; the witness is annulled but still there. One of the same strings comes down onto the back of the large body too, so the distinction between the one who works the strings and the one worked is erased. The bound body is one of art history's oldest subjects, but here the bond is as thin as a fine line, it does not hold the victim, it passes over him. The instrument of violence has come down to a decorative detail. The word victim in the title and the serial number turn this from an event into a procedure; as the ceremony repeats the person grows unimportant, and what remains is the chair and the bond. An extra hand entering the canvas from the lower left corner stands there without its owner being asked.
Form and Composition
The body stretches out on a diagonal rising from the lower left to the upper right, and when the line of the back traces the diagonal's upper edge and breaks at the top, the head hangs suspended at the tip of that break. While three separate tiers of scale are arrayed at the edges, the inverse proportion of the thin legs to the thick body makes the support look weak and the supported heavy.
The body stretches out on a diagonal rising from the lower left to the upper right. The line of the back traces the upper edge of this diagonal, and its apex stands about a sixth of the way down from the top, two thirds of the way in from the left. The diagonal breaks there and turns downward, the head hanging suspended at the tip of that break. The heaviest part of the mass is right in the centre, at belly level; the lightest part is the arm and hand on the left.
The crosswise format sets up a two-ended order. At the left end there are two small units: in the upper left corner a small mass made of roundnesses, tied up above by a thin cord; in the lower left corner two clawed extensions. Both are at a scale a tenth of the main figure. At the right end, meanwhile, stands a seating unit described with a line, its interior gridded; its scale is about a third of the main figure and on its own it holds the right quarter. Three separate tiers of scale are thus arrayed at the edges.
Beneath the main figure there is a second seating unit, in dark red lines, its four legs pressing onto the floor. Its legs descend to the bottom edge and end a finger's width short of the bottom. This unit does not appear to be carrying the figure's weight; the body passes over it, the point of contact uncertain. On the right, meanwhile, the figure's legs are long and thin, descending from the knee down as two separate columns and spreading with toes in the lower central region. The thinness of the legs is inversely proportional to the thickness of the body; the support is weak, the supported is heavy.
In the head region the textures change. The long conical unit above the head is hatched with horizontal bands; this is the only texture that repeats at regular intervals, and there is no such rhythm anywhere else on the surface. The bands grow denser upward. The tip of the conical unit touches the top edge, and a dark slice of ground remains in the upper right corner. A thin line coming out at mouth level stretches to the right and connects to the back of the other seating unit. This line is the only line binding the two masses.
The ground is flat and without depth, and there is a change of value only in the lower left corner; there a lighter triangular area marks its boundary with a straight edge. From the top edge two thin vertical lines droop down, one near the left corner, the other right in the centre. Both are cut off at a short distance and connect to nothing. The contour here is thick and uninterrupted. The surround of every mass is closed with a dark line, and the inner fills stay within that line. For this reason figure and ground mix at no point; the distinction weakens only at the tip of the left arm, where, because the fingers are thin and spaced apart, the ground passes between them. The inner texture of the masses is directional; in the hip region the folds are circular, in the chest region concentric rings, and in the legs lengthwise. Three separate directions work side by side in the same figure.
Colour and Light
The roundness of the peach body is built not with dark shadow but with rings of warmth that go from yellow to apricot to pink; nowhere is there a grey shadow. The never-lightened orange of the chair is the highest saturation of the surface, while the head, rotted with olive and black, shows that the same body has been painted with two separate palettes.
A peach-coloured body covers the centre, bent over, and at least three warm tones circulate within it. The middle of the masses is cadmium yellow, from there outwards it passes to apricot, and at the edges to a light salmon pink. The roundness is made not by using dark tone but by changing the warmth of the colour; nowhere is there a grey shadow, only rings that go from yellow to pink. At the centre of the breasts there stands a small red dot each, the two most saturated patches on the body. The ground moves back and forth between blue and purple. At the upper left a somewhat light cobalt, in the centre and on the right a darker area turning to violet, at the lower left a pale lilac region. The paint is laid thin and flat, its texture almost like paper. The relationship of this blue purple mass with the peach body is direct opposition; the two are at the two ends of the colour wheel and no intermediate tone has been used between them. At the boundary there is only the figure's own pink contour, and that too stays on the warm side.
The orange of the chair is the highest saturation of the whole surface. Close to vermilion, surrounded by dark red lines, never lightened. It is a register darker than the peach of the body and two steps more heated; and so it stands beneath the figure like a separate body. The horizontal orange strip on the left is of the same colour, no white mixed into it there either. The head is not at the same warmth as the rest of the painting. The face is a mixture of olive green and black, a rotten colour; the eyes are white, the mouth is made of thin lines combed in a reddish purple. The cap above the face is copper brown, dark strips drawn over it, and those strips grow denser towards the top. That the whole body of the figure is at a sweet warmth while the head is dirtied shows that a single body has been painted with two different palettes.
The chair on the right is white and ice blue, drawn with thin lines. There is no paint filling its interior, the purple of the ground passes through the gaps; and so the purple reads lighter within it. The lightest values on the surface are gathered in the lines of this chair and in the thin white threads hanging from above. The nails on the feet and the hands are black. Small, sharp, patches identical to one another; they too are the only unadulterated black on the surface. These dark points set at the ends of the warm body fix the boundaries of the figure against the blue. The dark red in the contours does the same work, but more softly. There is no sign of light at all. There is no shadow beneath the objects, even where the legs of the chair touch the ground the colour does not change. The small creature at the upper left is built of pink and cream patches, with two black crosses for its eyes; the colour of its body is a pale copy of the peach of the main figure. In the lower right corner a dark signature has been thrown over the purple, in a single stroke and with a dry brush.
Iconography, Myth and Title
As the pharaoh's headdress rises upward the collapse of the body shows that the office has become independent of its holder and that the requirement of the upright stance is broken. The pink pipe coming out of the mouth connects to the empty waiting chair and sets up the confession scene; the sequence number in the title turns a singular event into a procedure and renders the person insignificant.
On a red stool there is a peach-coloured body bent forward. Its back is hunched, the two rings on its chest jut forward, its arm reaches toward the left and ends in black-nailed fingers. Its feet resemble a bird's claw, and its nails too are black. Its head is small in relation to the body and made in a completely different language: a dark green face, white eyes, a lined mouth that stands as though closed with stitching. From the back of the head an orange, ridged headdress rises upward. The colour of the body and the colour of the head do not match.
That headdress is the clearest reference of the scene. The crown lengthening upward, divided by transverse lines, stands like the counterpart of the tall headdress in depictions of the pharaoh. The headdress carries power, but here the body that carries it is in a state of collapse. The crown above, the body below, the face hanging out. The upright stance, the most basic requirement of the image of a ruler, is broken; what remains is only the sign itself. This distance between the rising of the crown and the collapse of the body says that the office has become independent of its holder.
The pink pipe coming out of the mouth connects to the white chair on the right. This connection turns the scene into an interrogation room or a treatment room. The chair is woven with squared lines, short rays come out of its top; it is empty and waiting. In the tales the empty throne or the empty chair shows the office whose holder is awaited. Here the figure does not sit in that office, it is only connected to it by a tube. The word attachment in the title describes exactly this relation: there is contact, but no sitting. That what comes out of the mouth cannot be taken back is the unchanging rule of confession scenes.
At the upper left, at the end of strings hanging from the ceiling, a small figure hangs. Made of round masses, its ears long, it resembles a rabbit toy. On its face there are two crosses and on its belly one more cross. When a toy's eye is closed with a cross it means it no longer looks, that is, the witness of the scene has been cancelled. Yet because it stays hanging it continues to be there. In the lower left corner there are two more claws, belonging to another being whose body is not visible; it seems to creep in from the edge. Leaving the toys at the edge is an arrangement repeated in this series.
The word victim in the title and the sequence number say that this is part of a repeated arrangement. The second scene, that is, there was a first before it. This is the coldest side of sacrifice narratives; as the ceremony repeats, the person becomes insignificant, and only the seat and the bond remain. The legs of the chair are thin and long, with little forks where they touch the ground. A numbered scene turns a singular event into a procedure. The legs of the stool, on the other hand, are thick and red, a dark shadow accumulated beneath it; the space between the two seats has been filled with nothing.
Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious
The pink tube coming out of the mouth is attached not to a living being but to an empty chair, and the first bond made goes unanswered. While the body collapsed on all fours loses the side of it that belongs to the human, the head moves away from the body on a thin neck and breaks off; a splitting in which the one who undergoes and the one who thinks stand in separate places.
A pink tube coming out of the mouth is attached to the chair on the right. The connection has been made not with a living being but with an object. The tube seems to come from inside the body, it does not end at the mouth, it passes through and continues. Suckling or emptying, which of the two it is remains uncertain. A baby's first bond is in fact just such a tube; here that bond has been plugged into a piece of furniture and no response comes from the other side. The chair is white, empty and drawn with neat lines, the only cold object in the scene. Its lines are as regular as if drawn with a ruler; nowhere on the body is there such order. The side to which the bond is made is measured, the side making the bond is unruly.
The body is bent on all fours. The back is raised, the breasts hang down, the rear is left exposed. The feet are not human feet, they are bird claws with long talons. In this body the part that belongs to the human has steadily diminished. Strangest of all, the head stands very far from the body; carried by a thin, long neck all the way to the right edge. There is a disconnection between head and body. It is as though what the body undergoes and what the head undergoes take place in separate locations. Everyone knows such moments, I think; feeling, while something is happening, as though you were watching yourself from a distance. The thin blue lines running over the back stand like a strap or an old mark.
The face has turned into a mask. The eyes are utterly empty, left white, with no gaze inside them. The mouth is red and covered in stitches, that is where the tube passes through. The organ of speech has been turned into an organ of conveyance. The long, striped headdress above the head reaches up and away, like a ceremonial object that does not agree at all with the rest of the body. A humiliated body and an adorned head are gathered in the same figure. The lines of the headdress repeat at regular intervals, clear enough to be counted.
In the upper left there is a small puppet hung from strings, with crosses in place of its eyes. The white strings hanging from above do not go to it alone; one of the same strings descends to the back of the large body too. That is, the distinction between the one who works the puppet and the one worked has been removed. The large one is also strung up. Who moves whom, the painting does not say. The puppet's arms are opened to the sides, its legs hang; it is in no state to stand on its own.
In the lower left corner there is another arm standing apart from the body, its fingers taloned, spread on the ground. Whom it belongs to is unclear. A surplus limb wanders through the scene. In dreams such things happen, a hand stands there without its origin ever being asked. The legs of the chair are in contact with the floor, while the feet of the body have stayed suspended, without touching the ground. The boundary between the floor and the wall of the room has also been left faint; the space does not quite close.
Society, Power and Technology
The figure attached to the chair by a hose coming out of its mouth does not sit in the office but is fed by it; the seat has no power of its own, its power comes from the number of those attached to it, and a substitution of players does not turn the match around. The sewn-shut mouth tells how the tongue of the person who rises in an institution narrows, and how being promoted comes in return for falling silent the more one is promoted.
A hose coming out of the mouth is fastened to the chair on the right. The connection is not one-way, it is thick and fleshy; the two ends seem to be feeding one another. It is no accident that in Turkish the word koltuk carries two meanings. The man who holds office becomes, after a while, impossible to think of apart from that seat, and he himself does not know what will become of him if he is parted from it. The figure here does not even sit in the seat, it has been attached to it. Sitting is a temporary business, being attached is not.
The chair is drawn in lines, its inside not filled, like a squared grid. That is, the office is an empty frame. There is nothing inside it, but it is the one that feeds. Most institutions work this way; the seat itself has no power, its power comes from the number of those attached to it. If the man who sits in that seat today were to leave tomorrow, the seat would go on standing in the same place and would set up the same hose with the newcomer. We like to argue about persons, we do not like to argue about the seat, because arguing about the seat takes more effort. We suppose that things will be put right when the man changes. The man changes, things are not put right. As long as one does not touch where the authority is gathered, whom the reckoning is asked of, in which room the decision is taken, a substitution of players does not turn the match around.
On the figure's head there is a tall headpiece, striped, long. Every headpiece that extends upward does the same job, it makes you taller. But look at the rest of the body: the trunk is bent double, its back stooped, its arms fallen forward, its feet left thin. That is, the headpiece up above, the body down below. Even the man who stands at the top has someone he stoops to; there is no top that stoops to no one in any case, only the direction of the stooping is left outside the scene. The two fine strings hanging from above say exactly this, whoever's back is turned to whom, someone else is holding the string.
The mouth is sewn shut, there are rows of lines running over the lips. Since the connection is made through the mouth, the ability to speak is not used in any case. To keep up the exchange between himself and the office he must stay silent. I have seen how the tongue of people who rise in an institution narrows; first their jokes go, then their objections, and at last their sentences shorten and only approving sounds remain. Falling silent the more you are promoted, being promoted in return for falling silent; this trade is written nowhere but everyone knows its terms. Whatever the last person to speak in the meeting says, it resembles what the first to speak said.
In the top left corner a small figure hangs, a cross in the place of its eyes, its feet in the air. No one looks at it. It could be the seat's previous holder, or the next in line. Something like the old photographs of managers hung on the walls of executive offices; all of them once fed from the same hose, now none of them speaks. Below, in the bottom left corner, there are two hands lying on the ground, as if broken off from the body, their fingers open.
Art History and Comparison
While Peter Saul carries caricature's exaggeration over into oil paint, he always makes the painting strike at a target; in this scene there is no target to strike, the figure is bound to a chair. In Marsyas and Sebastian the bond is thick because it is the source of the pain; the rope here is as thin as a line, and the instrument of violence has descended to a decorative detail.
A long body bent over a stool, its arms let hang forward; the tips of the fingers black, as though nail varnish had been applied. Its head resembles a skull, its eyes dead white, its mouth closed with red stitches, and on top of it a striped cap recalling a pharaoh's headdress. A tube coming out of its mouth connects to the white chair on the right. At the upper left a small toy hangs by a rope, its eyes cancelled out with a cross-mark, swinging.
Such grotesque figures, stretching like rubber and painted in searing colours, opened up a broad place for themselves in American painting after the sixties. Peter Saul's canvases carried caricature's right to exaggerate over into oil paint; limbs are drawn out, teeth enlarged, the scene built like a gag. In Saul there is always a target, the painting strikes at someone or at an institution. In the scene here there is no target to strike. The figure has been bound to a chair, that is all; the answer to the question of by whom and why it was bound is not sought within the painting.
The relationship between the hanging toy and the bent body connects to the doll tradition of the twentieth century. Bellmer's jointed doll had turned anatomy into a matter of construction by breaking the body into pieces and reassembling it; there the doll is at the centre of the scene, all attention is upon it. Here the doll is hung at the edge, it does not take part in what is going on, it merely stands there. These small onlooker figures that recur across the series in fact work like a spectator's seat placed inside the painting.
The word pharaoh in the title and the striped cap on the head hold together. To quote the forms of Egyptian art into modern painting is an old habit, and is generally done to bring a sense of weight, of eternity. Here the quotation works in the opposite direction; the headdress, that is, the nemes-like covering, has been set upon a rotted head. The sign of permanence is fixed on the head of a body that has decayed. The chair beside it, too, is not a throne but an ordinary thin-wired piece of furniture. A thin blue rope is wound around the body's waist, and a line comes down from it. The bound figure is one of the oldest subjects in the history of painting; from the flaying of Marsyas to the binding of Sebastian to the post, the same scene was reconstructed for centuries, and there the bond was always visible, thick, convincing, because it is the source of the pain. The rope here is as thin as a line; it does not hold the victim, it passes over him. The instrument of violence has descended to the size of a decorative detail.
Within the series' 2019 group this canvas is one of the works that carries the most narrative. There is a sense of space, there is furniture, there is even a tube that makes a connection; something resembling a plot has been set up. We learn from the title that it is number two, that is, one of the rare cases in which the artist has returned to a subject twice. In the other works of the same year the desire to set up a scene is not this open. In the lower left corner there is one more hand, entering from outside the canvas; whose it is cannot be seen, only its fingers enter the painting.
Material, Gesture and the Viewer's Experience
As the two white threads hang from top to bottom their thickness does not tremble at all from start to finish, and only running the brush with little paint and at a constant speed gives this. The chair on the right is left in transparent line, not filled in, and because the blue beneath strikes up from every square it looks more like a cage than a matter.
Two thin white threads hang from top to bottom; both are left with a single pull of a fine-tipped brush. Their thickness does not change from start to finish, they do not tremble; to do this the brush must be run with little paint, at a constant speed, and the moment it touches the canvas. One is near the left edge, the other at the centre, and both begin from the upper margin of the canvas. The white there does not fully cover the blue beneath it, and the blue reads faintly within the threads. No second pass was made, they were left in their first state.
The blue ground was laid on before the figure and dried thoroughly. I make this out from the edges of the figure; nowhere that the skin colour spills beyond has the blue been pulled up, the two have not smeared into each other. The ground has two tones within itself, a little lighter on the left side, darkening towards the right; the place of transition is about a brush-width wide and is not blurred but overlapped. In the lower left corner there is a lighter, triangular area; the blue there is left in a single coat and the weave of the canvas shows along its whole length.
The modelling inside the body is made with short strokes following the direction of the volume. At the hip the strokes trace an arc, at the calf they descend from top to bottom, at the back they go horizontal. These do not ride over one another, they stand side by side, and between them there are thin corridors where the gold yellow is left open. Then a dark red contour was passed over all this fullness. Look at the places where that contour ends: on the outside of the calf the line suddenly cuts off somewhere, the brush lifted before the paint ran out. The nails are placed one by one in black with short, hard touches, some of them spilling beyond the contour.
The inside of the headpiece on the right is filled like a comb. Some forty horizontal lines one over another, all in the same direction, orange ground left between them. None of them was returned to; some touch and join one another, some stop halfway. The chair on the right, on the other hand, consists only of line, not filled in at all; the white stays thin and transparent, and the blue beneath strikes up from every square. So the chair looks more like a cage than a matter. The speed of the hand that drew the squares is clear too; the vertical lines are even, the horizontal ones bent somewhere and were not corrected.
A canvas used crosswise; its ninety-centimetre edge lies horizontal and, hung at eye level, the whole picture fits into a single point of view. Looked at from a metre and a half, you feel that the paint never swelled, that everything lies on the same plane. Looked at from forty centimetres, meanwhile, those side-by-side corridors inside the body open up and the flesh you thought was flat becomes piece by piece. The screen shows this picture cleaner than it is; the bright blue burns on the screen with its own light, whereas on the wall that blue is a matt, absorbent and far quieter surface. The two crosses on the eyes of the small figure at the upper left look like the last marks flung in the picture; they are scratched with a dry brush over everything on top.
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