Virgil on Virtual Cage (final_final-finalV9), 2026: a reading in seven lenses
Acrylic on canvas, 80 × 100 cm (31 ½ × 39 ⅜ in). Painting by Yiğit Özen.
At a Glance
A transparent box, drawn from above in thin white lines, sits on top of everything beneath it. The lines are hard and continuous; the inside of the box, by contrast, is soft, scattered, organic. At the centre a large body is sunk into a yellow between saffron and scorched melon, and the most saturated zone of the canvas is here. The veins of purple and lilac settling into the folds of the cloth push the yellow forward, and the body seems to shine not from a source outside it but from within itself. On its head is a curly white wig, the sign of a judge or a court official; just beneath the chin a thin lapel microphone hangs. When the two signs meet in the same face, who the figure is grows blurred. The eyes are half closed, the hand rests on the cheek, the speech cut off in the middle.
The arrangement that surrounds him recalls the sacred assembly of a saint or a mother built up with angels and children, but the halo at the centre has given its place to the wig. At the lower left a child with greenish skin reaches towards the centre, as if wanting to hold on. The baby below is uncanny: the body is a child's, the head a bearded, aged face; two ages pressed into the same body, the belly and groin put forward as its most defenceless part. The large figure on the right looks outward, its face sullen; the centre turns to no one. A community gathered around power, but at whose face power does not look. The transparent box does not protect the one inside, it only shows him; the body that closes its eyes stays open, all the same, to being displayed as though in a shop window. This figure wired to a microphone seems to have ceased to be the one who passes judgment and turned into a broadcast, condemned to visibility.
The paint left the box in a single pass and, being thinned, ran at the corners, with no one stopping it. The real paste consistency is in the pink heap below: dabbed on with the tip of the brush, greens and light pinks settling wet into wet one against another, scratched here and there with a sharp point. That pink covering calls up a rose garden, and yet the flowers are hurried and scattered, and the garden too has stayed inside the box. At the top left a cheap plastic garden chair that looks as though it is hung on the wall; that empty monobloc of waiting rooms. The distance between the wig on the bench and this chair carries the heart of the work. The white curls the wig has raised are the highest ridge of the painting; the microphone line, meanwhile, was laid down last, a thin track over the drying orange.
Form and Composition
The box drawn from above in thin white lines sets up a hard, continuous geometry, while beneath it the contours of the figures soften and scatter. The light-value head gives the sharpest jump in value where it rides onto the dark upper ground, and at the bottom centre the skirt merges into the grainy area and collapses the distinction between figure and ground.
A box drawn from above in thin white lines builds the painting's geometric skeleton. The ceiling plane seems a light-value hexagon along the top edge, and from it two verticals drop down. These lines are hard and continuous; everything beneath them is soft and scattered. The cage sits on top of the organic mass.
A large mass gathers at the centre. Its top begins at the head, widens downward and spreads to the base, a roughly triangular seating. The weight is at the centre. The head is at the top centre, marked by a light-value mass of hair. Because this light patch rides up onto the dark ground behind it, the painting's sharpest jump in value occurs here. The eye enters from here. The axis is not quite vertical. The head tilts to the left, the forearm reaches to the right, and so the body is tipped slightly. Symmetry is set up and at once broken.
The lower two thirds and the two sides are filled with a grainy texture. Small touches repeat unit by unit, and a rhythm emerges. This texture is mid value and flat; it does not recede, it hangs suspended like an area. The upper corners are closed off with dark mass. Light head, dark top, grainy bottom; a three-band value order emerges.
The distinction between figure and ground collapses at the bottom. As the central figure's skirt descends it loses its contour, merging with the small body lying beneath and with the grainy ground. Where the cloth ends and the ground begins is unclear. At the top the distinction is clear; the head stands alone in front of the dark void, and the silhouette's distance from the top edge is wide. Three small figures surround the main mass. In the lower region on the left a small body reaches its hands forward. At the bottom centre a figure lies on its back, its legs raised, setting up a diagonal at the centre. On the right another figure is on its knees, its cloth cut off by the right edge. The difference in scale is large; the central mass is several times their size. This difference gives a sense of hierarchy more than of depth. The contour of these figures too is broken in places, their edges seeping into the grainy area.
At the top left, inside the dark area, a small chair hangs suspended on top of a light patch. Cut off from the rest of the crop, a unit on its own. It draws part of the weight to the left. The verticals of the box drop down the sides from above, and the grainy area spreads horizontally; these two forces contend at the centre with the tilted axis of the figure. The eye's route begins at the head, descends with the vertical flow of the skirt, snags at the diagonal in the bottom centre, passes to the figure on the right and turns back upward; the chair at the top left remains a secondary stop. The crop cuts the grainy area on all four edges, and the boundary of the composition seems to continue somewhere outside the canvas.
Colour and Light
In front of the tar-black ground the saffron body burns from within, taking its saturation from the ground with no outside light source to be made out. The green flecks scattered across the dirtied pink of the lower half and the leaden head below stand as cool counter-points that turn down the fire of the yellow.
A yellow between saffron and scorched melon covers the central body from top to bottom, and the most saturated zone of the canvas gathers there. Within the yellow there are transitions sliding towards orange and, here and there, towards honey; into the folds of the cloth, veins of purple and lilac have settled. This cool purple, set right beside the warm yellow, pushes the two colours apart and throws the amber still further forward, setting up a tension close to the complementary. Somewhere at the centre of the body a dirty patch turning to olive green cuts the brightness of the yellow for a moment.
The pink filling the lower half is not a single pink. Salmon, dusty rose and here and there a raw pink build a broken texture with green and pale yellow flecks scattered among them. This speckled handling does not let the colour stay clean; the pink has been laid on dabbed, struck one layer over another, left dirtied. Looked at close, the green specks work not as the pink's neighbour but as its opposite, and set the texture trembling.
The ground above is almost tar black, dropping to its darkest value in the top right corner. At the top left a pink panel and a yellowish chair standing on it emerge from within the black, and that corner warms a little. Right beside the black the amber body stands like a lantern; the dark ground raises the saturation of the yellow and burns the colour more than it really is. The value range is wide: it stretches from the darkest black to the lightest point of the white wig and of the thin white lines that draw the ceiling. Along the bottom edge a dark maroon merging into the black leaves a band, at the very bottom, between blood colour and darkness.
No definite direction of light can be made out. The yellow body seems to shine not from a source coming from outside but from within itself; there is no clear shadow side across the face, the colour lights itself. The white wig and the white accents on the cloth are the lightest patches of the painting, but they show not a light source but the weight of the colour itself. The grey box surface at the top stays cool and dull, a measured ground against the warmth below.
On the figure to the right there is a cloth of magenta and purplish lilac, setting a cool mass against the warm yellow at the centre. The skin of the small figure on the left tends towards green and creates a pallid dissonance within the pink. Near the centre, lower down, a grey and leaden head stays as the only cool flesh colour among the warm skins. While all the warmth is gathered in the amber, these few green and grey specks turn down the fire of the palette and hold the painting in balance, answering the burning of the yellow with small cool holes.
Iconography, Myth and Title
When the judge's wig and the lapel microphone come together in the same face, Virgil, the guide of the land of the dead, turns into an object on display speaking in a transparent cage. The plastic chair hung on the wall cheapens the throne; the angel, the putto and the bearded body being held turn the sacred assembly into a scene of judgment.
A curly white wig frames the head of the large seated figure like an old judge or a court official; just beneath the chin a thin lapel microphone hangs. When these two signs meet in the same face, who the figure is grows blurred. Hand resting on his cheek, eyes half closed, he is pinned to a moment as though he had broken off speaking in the middle. His robe is wide, his manner of sitting like that of someone installed on a throne; but the glass box surrounding him turns that throne into a display case.
Small beings have gathered around him. At the lower left a child with greenish skin reaches upward, towards the figure, with the air of a putto; there is a pleading, begging quality to him. On the right a winged angel seems to hold, with its hands, a small, bearded, ash-grey body below; the legs of that body hang in the air, gone limp. This arrangement calls to mind the sacred assembly scenes in which a saint enthroned or a mother is surrounded by angels and children. The scheme of the sacred conversation is set up, but the halo at the centre has given its place to the wig.
The title recalls Virgil, the poet who shows the way in the land of the dead, that guide. Here the guide has been seated inside a virtual cage. The glass cube, with the lid at its top, closes over the figures like a display cabinet or a studio booth. The voice that once guided souls may now have turned into a voice that speaks into a microphone, watched from inside a transparent box. Guidance itself seems reduced to a show, to a broadcast.
A plastic garden chair has been fixed to the left wall of the cage, as though an icon or a reliquary were being hung. The sign of the throne has here fallen to its cheapest form; the actual seat meant for sitting is empty and worthless. The wig is the sign of judgment, the microphone that of the word. The wings add angelhood to this. Together these signs also bring a courtroom scene to mind. The bearded body held below can be read as a criminal brought before judgment or as a dead man taken down from the cross. The reaching of the green child, meanwhile, resembles an objection to this judgment, a plea for mercy.
The pink flowers covering the lower part call up a rose garden, a paradise; and yet this garden too remains inside the box, behind the glass, like a painted stage set. The virtual version of paradise. The moment the scene chooses is not an action; it is that interval in which the guide stops and thinks, perhaps grows tired, perhaps falls into doubt about what he is to say. The mouth from which speech is expected has fallen silent, the hand has gone to the face. Everyone inside the box is seen, no one can get out; they have stayed there as an assembly listened to, put on display.
Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious
The face at the centre has closed its eyes but is displayed in a transparent cage; the body that refuses to look, unable to escape being seen, is caught between shame and exhibition. The bearded, aged head of the baby below carries the displacement of dream logic, while the empty chair leaks an unnamed loss into the scene.
The closed eyes stand right at the centre, and on top of that there is a small microphone brought right up to the mouth. Someone made ready to speak, who has stopped seeing. This doubleness is what holds me: the mouth is equipped, kept open for sound, while the eye has drawn back into itself, lowered. As if to shield itself from the burden the gaze would bring, the eyes have closed, yet the voice still reaches outward. That a face closing inward should leave a channel open to the outside is a strange open door.
The hand has touched the face, holding some place between the chin and the cheek. This is a self-touching, self-soothing movement; perhaps a defence trying to cover the face halfway. The white wig wraps the face from both sides and turns it into a frame, almost into a mask. The face is there, visible, yet under the weight of the hair it also seems half hidden. A head caught between being seen and hiding.
The transparent box surrounding the figure draws the boundary between inside and outside, and at the same moment renders that boundary useless. This is a cage of glass; it does not protect the one inside, it only shows him. The body that closes its eyes stays open, all the same, to being displayed as in a shop window. The tension between shame and visibility becomes palpable. Someone who wants to hide cannot hide behind a transparent wall.
To my mind the small figures around him feel like leftovers of childhood that have broken off from the main body and come back. The little one at the lower left reaches its hand towards the centre, as if wanting to hold on. The baby below is uncanny: the body is a child's, but the head is a bearded, aged face. Whose face is this, a baby's or a man on whom the years have passed? The displacing logic of dreams is at work here; an adult head has been set onto a baby's flesh, two ages pressed into the same body. The legs are in the air, the belly and groin exposed; the most defenceless place has been put right at the centre. This exhibition leaves an anxiety in me.
The large figure on the right is looking, its face sullen, its eye turned outward. The centre does not look, this one does; the whole burden of the gaze seems to have been unloaded onto it, and it carries it unwillingly. The little ones turn towards the centre, but the centre turns to no one. Who is the object of desire here? There is a turning towards, but no answer. Where the aggression goes is not clear either; no one strikes anyone, yet the centre's ceasing to look may itself be a kind of withdrawal, an anger turned inward. The pink mass rising from below seems to swallow the figures from underneath; a soft, foamy texture covers the skirts, the legs, and the bodies are half sunk into this softness. The fear of being swallowed and the wish to be held meet in the same texture. The empty chair hanging alone on the left wall, meanwhile, waits for someone to sit; a void as if someone who ought to be sitting has gone, an absence that does not say who is missing.
Society, Power and Technology
The figure wearing the judge's wig is wired to a microphone and shut inside a transparent glass box; office and captivity gather in the same body and turn visibility into a punishment. The bodies around him reach out to him, he looks at no one, and the empty plastic chair above marks the place the ordinary person has left before the institution.
The white curly wig looks as though it has fallen from a courtroom bench, and the face beneath it is tired, the eyes half closed, the hand resting on the chin. The person wearing this wig carries a sign of authority; the sign of the law and of the one who passes judgment. But the body carrying that sign is itself seated inside a box. A transparent glass box has been drawn around the figure in thin white lines. He sits inside, he can see the outside, he can be seen from outside, he cannot get out. Office and detention are joined in the same body.
A thin wire runs down beside the face, and at the level of the mouth a small microphone stands. So this person speaks, speaks constantly, his voice relayed somewhere. Someone seated at the bench and wired to a microphone looks like someone who has ceased to be the one passing judgment and turned into a broadcast. He may be heard at every moment, recorded at every moment. It is precisely for this reason that the transparent box is meaningful; the person inside has been condemned to visibility. Closed but able to be watched. A watching eye seems always to be there. In this apparatus speaking looks to have become not a power but an obligation. Even if he falls silent, because he stays inside the box he will go on being seen.
Around him there are smaller bodies. On the left a plump child figure stretches its arms towards the centre. On the right another figure resembling a winged one leans against the central one, amid pink and grey cloths. In front, at the foot, a small dark-haired body is curled up. All are turned towards the person at the centre. There is a state of pleading, of waiting here. The crowd looks to the centre, the centre looks at no one; his head in his palm, sunk into his own weariness. A community gathered around power, but at whose face power does not turn to look.
At the top left there is a cheap plastic chair that looks as though it is hung on the wall. It is that monobloc chair we all know; the chair of waiting rooms, of government offices, of hospital corridors. Utterly empty. No one sits in it. The distance between the wig on the bench and this plastic chair carries the heart of the matter. The wig carries office and being seen; the chair carries the place the ordinary person has left empty. That the chair hangs in the air, on the wall, makes it stranger still; the place meant for sitting is not real, it looks like a painted word. The very institution that keeps people waiting has been pushed to the edge of the painting, empty and functionless.
The ceiling of the glass box is drawn grey and flat, coming down from above like a lid. The person seated inside remains under this lid. He speaks, he has his microphone, his voice comes out, but because the walls are transparent his body, as much as his voice, has become the property of the outside. Being seen and being shut in happen here at the same moment. Even when the bodies around him reach out, they seem to reach not towards that glass surface but towards the space between them.
Art History and Comparison
The construction that surrounds the enthroned wigged figure with putti and an angel borrows the sacra conversazione scheme of the Italian Baroque, but the microphone pressed to the mouth and the transparent cage empty the sacred from the language of the altar. The clumsy putti and the mask-faced baby bring the work close to the anti-academic clumsiness of Sandro Chia and Guston.
With its white curls recalling judges' wigs, its body sunk into a golden-yellow robe, and its pose with the cheek propped on the fist, the figure at the centre overlays two separate memories of the history of painting. This pose, the hand waiting beneath the chin, is the classic gesture of the image of melancholy that has run on ever since Dürer's Melencolia engraving. But the construction that seats the figure amid a winged child, the plump putti below and a field of flowers comes from the Italian Renaissance and the Baroque scheme of the enthroned Meryem, that is, the sacra conversazione. The thin microphone touching the mouth and the transparent cage shutting the figure inside empty that scheme of its piety. An altarpiece would set up a window opening onto the sacred; the construction here, by contrast, seals the figure inside a transparent cage, and this turns it into the reverse of the tradition.
The covering of pink flowers filling the lower half calls up the medieval tradition of Meryem in the rose garden, the mille fleur meadows of Stefan Lochner or Schongauer. Only, that tradition worked its flowers one by one with the patience of a miniaturist; the flowers here are hurried and scattered, refusing that meticulous order. This sugary world of flesh and pink also brings to mind the plump figures of Lisa Yuskavage, but the place of Yuskavage's smooth, dreamlike surface is taken here by a coarser, unworked image.
The clumsy, lumpy bodies of the putti set the work beside neo-expressionism and the Bad Painting vein. The mask-like face of the greenish baby on the left, for its part, harks back to the CoBrA circle, Karel Appel's childlike and aggressive faces; only, where Appel would push such a thing almost into abstraction, the countenance here stays a legible expression. Sandro Chia of the Transavanguardia would redraw the fleshy figures of Italian mythology with exactly this anti-academic clumsiness; but Chia would build his figure on a bare ground, whereas the company here is sunk in a sea of flowers. It also recalls Guston's late-period cartoon figures, that pink flesh and those ordinary objects dropped into the scene. The plastic garden chair hanging in the air at the top left is exactly this Guston move: a vulgar object left in the middle of a serious arrangement. The difference is that Guston would come down to a few hooded lines, whereas the scene here keeps its crowded Baroque cast.
The seat on the throne in the golden robe at the front also alludes to the icon tradition and its hierarchical stillness. The wire cage box cutting across the top rejects single-vanishing-point perspective, keeping the space as flat as an icon or a folk painting. Yet the icon demands awe and calm; here everything fills with a hurried, fidgety liveliness.
The problem it inherits stands at the core of twentieth-century figurative painting: how to bring the figure back after abstraction without returning to academic illusion. Its answer has been to quote the old masters in a mocking tongue; it takes the grammar of the altar panel and tears the sacred out of it from within. The tip of the microphone, meanwhile, still waits pressed to the mouth of the figure on the throne.
Material, Gesture and the Viewer's Experience
The pink heap at the sides is dabbed on with the tip of the brush and scratched while wet, at a paste consistency; it rises millimetres from the surface and reads only when you bring your nose up to the canvas. The white box at the top, by contrast, is laid down in a single pass in thinned paint, the paint sagging down under its own weight from lines that let the darkness beneath leak through.
The white box lines are laid down at the very top in a horizontal stroke, with a straight-edged brush; because the paint is thinned, the darkness beneath leaks up through the line. Down from that horizontal line two thin white runs descend, the paint having flowed there under its own weight, no one stopping it. The hand left the box in a single pass and did not go back over it. The corners are not sharp as if pressed against a ruler; where the tip of the brush trembled the line thins, then thickens again. On the vertical edge to the right the paint has stayed a little more loaded, and there the white sits without sinking into the dark.
The real paste consistency is in the pink heap below and at the sides. There the paint has been dabbed on with the tip of the brush, pressed one layer over another, greens and light pinks settling wet into wet one inside the other. It looks as if it would feel raised if you touched it with a finger, rising a few millimetres from the surface. In some places the inside of the wet paint has been scraped with a sharp point, and the dark beneath has come out there. This is the thickest region of the canvas, the one the hand has wandered over most; the paint has gathered there, dried, and been pressed over once again.
The orange robe in the middle is swept in with a broad brush, in loaded but more fluid paint. The folds are flung in a single direction, and at the turns the brush has left its own track; the speed of the flinging can be read from the tail of the paint. The purple-grey shadows of the robe were laid over while wet, so the boundary between the orange and the shadow is soft, run together, with no cut. When it comes to the wig the hand has grown heavy: it has loaded the white lavishly and, turning the brush round and round, raised the curls. That is the highest ridge of the painting, with reliefs that hold the light on top of them, the paint standing there like paste.
The dark at the back is drawn vertically over the red with an almost dry brush; it breathes through from between the red lines beneath it, especially on the left. The pink patch at the top left is far thinner, like a membrane, and a chair has been scribbled onto it in watered-down paint, leaving a drying line. The faces are worked wet into wet, the yellows rubbed together with the greys by a soft brush, then, before they dried, brow and eye redrawn with a thin dark line. The flesh of the child figure below is between grey and yellow, pulled while wet, the leg extended outward in a single stroke.
The work is large, a surface at chest height. Step a few paces back and the box and the bodies fall into place; from a distance the painting pulls itself together. But to really read that pink heap you have to bring your nose close to the canvas; the relief works only at that distance, and flattens out from far off. The microphone line was laid down last, over the drying orange with a thin brush, together with the tiny lump at its tip. Along the bottom edge dark paint is drawn horizontally and pushed to the side, making a small pool at the edge. At the top and right edges the weave of the canvas strikes out from where the paint skipped, and there the cloth is left bare.
Back to Virgil on Virtual Cage (final_final-finalV9)
