walls of perception, 2026: a reading in seven lenses
Acrylic on canvas, 50 × 70 cm (19 ⅝ × 27 ½ in). Painting by Yiğit Özen.
At a Glance
A butter-yellow column spilling from a mouth forms the spine of the painting; it begins beneath the chin, widens as it descends and reaches its broadest point in the bowl on the table. The paint there is not thinned, but heaped in the thickness it left the tube; each clot is set apart by the tip of the brush, cold grey flecks fallen between them, and the palette's saturation hits its ceiling precisely in this corridor. To either side lies the coolest region of the surface, the warm colour confined to a narrow column. The petrol-green wall behind and the burgundy cloth below regard one another from the two ends of the spectrum, and there is a faint boiling along the border where they touch. The single unit on the right, a triangular glass and the thorny purple flower rising from it, topples the symmetry of the jacket's opposed wings, shifting the weight to the right; that purple, the opposite of the yellow, sets up the complementary relationship in this corner alone.
The broad brim of the hat has come down before the face like a disc; the ring of light set upon a saint's head has slid forward and turned into an eave, a curtain that cuts off the gaze. Beneath it there is almost no eye to speak of, red threads wound about a mouth or a wound. This closure chimes with the way the title speaks of the walls of perception; the organ that would see is covered, the spilling mouth left open. The direction of the feeding scene is reversed, the hand does not travel from plate to mouth, the mouth fills the plate. Where column and bowl meet, the distinction between figure and object collapses, the line dividing what pours out from what is inside the vessel disappears. One reading ties this to the mouth of the smooth-tongued speaker who turns others beneath his word, another to a figure consuming itself with an insatiable hunger; both speak of a vomited, uncontrolled heap.
The rest of the body is exceedingly tidy; a dark jacket, broad shoulders, a back leaning into the chair. This construction of an official's portrait summons Velázquez's seated dignitary, the disintegrating mouth summons Bacon's screaming popes, only here the scream is turned downward. The only way to identify the figure is by the things upon him; the right hat, the goblet, the beaded spoon are taken as signs of sitting at a table. The cells that years ago built bodies have here passed not into flesh but into the yellow heap pouring from the mouth. On the fifty-by-seventy canvas this relief appears only from the side, in light that grazes the surface; on a screen it drops to a flat patch.
Form and Composition
The light-value grainy column descends from the figure's mouth to the bowl below and builds the spine of the vertical format, and when the two forms merge the distinction between figure and object collapses. The jacket's mirror symmetry is broken by the single triangular pane of glass at the right centre with its spiked peak, shifting the weight to the right.
A grainy column spills down from the figure's mouth and descends all the way to the bowl below. This light-value column is the painting's spine, not a single piece but broken-edged and rough-surfaced. Its width opens out a little as it descends, reaching its widest at the mouth of the bowl. Its breadth is about half a head's width; it stays thin, yet it is the longest vertical unit, cutting across the greater part of the height. The vertical format carries this spilling, because the height is markedly greater than the width and the eye enters ready to flow from top to bottom.
At the top the brim of the hat opens out a horizontal slab, covering more than half the width from left to right. Its two ends hang suspended in the air, casting a shadow over the dark band of the face beneath it. This slab is the painting's lightest-value mass; with the dark band of the mouth immediately below it, it makes a hard jump in value. The breadth of the slab is close to shoulder width, stretching the upper half sideways. Its edges are soft, scattering as they rub against the ground, with no closing contour. The thin light strip of ground along the bottom edge is the second horizontal and the only clear floor plane.
The jacket opens out to the sides in two dark masses. The left and right wings are built as mirror images of each other, leaving a V on the central axis. At the collar line a dark triangle closes inward, and at the base of that V the column begins. The symmetry breaks on the right: at the right mid-line there is a triangular pane of glass with a spiked peak rising from within it, and the left wing has no counterpart to it. This single unit shifts the weight to the right and topples the mirrored order. The distinction between the dark jacket and the mid-value ground behind is firm at the edges, and the silhouette reads there without strain.
The lower third is filled by a dark red cloth, cut into something close to an octagon, with two folds drooping down at the sides; this is the painting's heaviest lower mass. The bowl sits on top of the cloth, its light value from the same family as the column above. Where the two forms meet, the distinction between figure and object collapses, and the line separating what is poured from what is inside the vessel disappears. In the bottom right corner a small spoon with a handle stands alone on top of the cloth, attached to no mass.
The mid-value area behind gathers in the two upper corners, where there is no unit at all; that is the widest void. The scale hierarchy works with a single central figure, and there is no small figure at the edge watching it; that role is taken on by small satellite units such as the pane of glass on the right with the form on its peak, and the spoon below. The eye enters from the bright brim of the hat, darkens at the band of the mouth and drops down the column, spreads across the bowl and reaches the cloth, is drawn up from there by the vertical form on the right, and snags at the right edge before it can turn back to the central axis.
Colour and Light
A butter-yellow spill descends from the chin to the plate as a vertical column, and the two sides of this narrow corridor, where saturation peaks, are the coolest places on the surface. As the petrol-green wall and the maroon table face off from opposite ends, the navy jacket, under the pressure of the green in front of it, drops almost to a silhouette.
A butter-yellow spill begins beneath the chin and descends to the plate, thickening as it goes; the saturation of the palette peaks exactly there. Along this vertical corridor the paint is raised and opaque, standing almost as thick as if it had been troweled on with a spoon; no other colour rides over it, and it keeps its tone, somewhere between cadmium and corn yellow, without any disturbance at all. Below, the plate that receives it is a pale greenish cream, and where the yellow touches it the tone climbs a further register. Among the mass of yellow heaped onto the plate there are cool grey flecks here and there, and when those greys fall into the yellow they knock its brightness down a notch. The two sides of this downpour are the coolest zones of the surface; the warm colour is thus confined to a narrow column.
The whole of the back wall is petrol green. A tone between emerald and sea glass, combed in a single direction; the brush marks are visible but the colour is all of a piece. The maroon table below stands directly opposite the green; they face one another from two separate ends of the colour spectrum. Because each keeps its saturation, there is a slight simmering along the implicit boundary where they meet. The table is not pure maroon; towards its centre it slides into blood, towards its edges into a brighter terracotta, and it darkens on the inner face of the folds. The green of the ground brings the figure's navy jacket down to a silhouette; the jacket is already dark, and in front of the green it blackens further and sticks to the wall along its edges.
The value range is opened wide here. The darkest point is the navy well beneath the chest of the jacket, the lightest the cream hat above the head together with the strip of white ground below. The distance between the two is large, which is why the surface reads harder than in many works of the series. The cream of the hat is thick and matte, pale blue shadows wander across its top, and its brim is almost ivory. Where the face should be there stands a dark grey band, into which vertical notches of coral and blood red have been ranged; small but saturated. The lilac on the hatband and the red of these notches are the only warm escapees in the upper half. At the middle of the band there is a small blue eye-mark, sitting as the darkest speck within the pale lilac around it.
Three separate blues feed the cool side. The bow tie just beneath the chin is pure cobalt, small in area but the cleanest blue. The triangular field on the right is a cool blue verging on silver, and on it stands a thin-stemmed lilac flower; that purple, as the opposite of the yellow, sets up the complementary relationship only in this corner of the painting. Violet and silver have been left side by side there without mixing, a wet boundary remaining between them.
No definite direction of light can be made out. A cast shadow is sought but not found; brightness has settled wherever the paint was heaped, gathering where the yellow rises and dying out where the wall thins. At the right end of the table, on the edge of the plate, a thin beaded spoon hangs, remaining as a single cool grey patch within the maroon that surrounds it.
Iconography, Myth and Title
The wide-brimmed hat, lowering the saint's halo in front of the face and turning it into an awning, closes the eye of the perception named in the title and leaves the mouth open. The yellow flow emptying from mouth to plate reverses the direction of feeding; the hand does not go from plate to mouth, the mouth fills the vessel and calls up the cycle of the insatiable curse.
A yellow downpour empties from the lower end of the face, tips forward and piles up on the white plate below. The rest of the face cannot be read; red and pink filaments are tangled together there, and no opening we might call an eye remains. On the head sits a cream-coloured, wide-brimmed hat; its brim spills to either side and has thrown the face into shadow from top to bottom. At the neck a dark blue bow tie, on the body a dark jacket, and behind, the back of the armchair melts into the same darkness as the jacket. To the right there is a stemmed glass, and instead of an olive a purple flower sits inside it. On a red cloth, a plate; beside the plate, a spoon with a handle.
The brim of the hat is like a disc lowered in front of the face. The halo of light placed behind a saint's head has here slid forward and turned into an awning; the mark of holiness has become a curtain that cuts off the gaze. The title speaks of the walls of perception, and this is exactly what it shows: the organ that would do the work of seeing is nowhere to be found, the face has been walled over. The seeing side has been closed off, the pouring side left open. The red tangle beneath the curtain stands both like a wound and like a mouth worn down by talking. Saying walls of perception rather than doors of perception also confirms this closure; where there should be something to open and look through, there is a walled-over surface. The blue triangle beneath the bow tie is like a knot placed at the level of the throat where the flow begins; it marks the place from which speech issues.
The pouring yellow flow is the axis of the scene. Something gold-coloured emptying from the mouth calls to mind that old epithet given to the honey-tongued speaker; the mouth that turns speech into gold. But the flow here does not resemble speech, it is lumpy like a vomited heap. Abundance and excess come from the same pipe. Then there is the question of direction. In feeding scenes the hand goes from the plate to the mouth; here the process has been reversed, the mouth fills the plate. A figure who does not eat but empties. The story of that man cursed with an insatiable hunger who in the end consumed his own body is bound up in just such a cycle.
The laying of the table stands close to the order of a rite. A table for one, before it a vessel being filled, beside it a second, stemmed vessel. The glass takes the place of the cup raised into the air in ceremonial scenes; putting a flower in it instead of an olive says that something to be smelled has taken the place of something to be drunk. The beads on the handle of the spoon lift it out of being an ordinary fork and liken it to a ceremonial object set on the table. The scene tries to be a portrait, because the figure sits frontally and has posed; but a portrait whose face has been erased breaks its own rule. What is recorded is not who he is but what comes out of his mouth. The yellow spilling over the rim of the plate has not yet come down to the table, the flow continues, and no sign that would stop it is in view.
Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious
While the brim of the hat covers the gaze, the mouth has been left wide open; concealed sight and exhibited mouth come face to face on the same face. The direction of eating has been reversed, the body empties itself out towards the plate, and there is nothing to hold that emptying back.
The brim of a broad white hat has come down over the face, and from beneath it only a small blue eye leaks out, and even that does not look straight ahead but off to the side. The purple band around the hat encircles the head and takes the rest of the face into shadow. The seeing region, then, has been covered. Against this, just below, where the chin ought to be, a red, toothed mouth stands wide open. While the region of sight is hidden, the mouth has been left defenceless. On a face, what is concealed and what is left exposed often point to one another; here the gaze is what is concealed, and the mouth is what has been left exposed.
From that mouth a yellow discharge spills downward. A grainy, foamy yellow mass, resembling cornflakes or regurgitated food, comes down from the throat and fills the plate on the table. The direction of the eating scene has been reversed. Normally the plate goes to the mouth; here the mouth empties into the plate. What is expected to be taken in is instead given out. This is a moment in which the body pours itself into a bowl, and this emptying does not appear to be under control. The discharge is broad, scattered, about to spill over the edges. Something that cannot be held back comes out of the mouth, and the figure does not resist it. The bowl below has also been set like a plate, placed in front of someone; but what fills it is not food, it is the thing that person could not hold in.
And yet the rest of the body is exceedingly composed. A dark jacket, broad shoulders, a back leaning into the chair behind; someone seated, collected, dignified, settled into place. A red cloth is spread over the table, on the right a purple thorny plant stands in a stemmed glass, in front a tasselled fork waits. The table is laid, everything in its proper place. In the very middle of this order the body quietly pours itself out. The composure of its outside and the overflowing of its inside are like the two faces of the same move. To empty oneself like this at the head of a laid table means risking being seen; perhaps this is exactly why the hat covers that face. The shame of the emptying mouth has been left unclaimed, along with a face drawn into shadow.
The plant inside the glass on the right has opened out into a purple head, its thorns flung outward, and no one turns towards it. The tasselled fork does not touch the plate, it stands to one side; it has been set out as though there were food, but there is no one eating. All the implements of a meal are there, only the act of eating itself has been turned inside out. And in any case the plate fills not with food but with the thing poured from above.
Whether that small blue eye beneath the hat sees all of this, or is unaware of its own emptying, I could not make out. The brim has taken the eye into such a shadow that where the gaze falls cannot be told.
Society, Power and Technology
Under the wide-brimmed hat and the bow tie there stands not a face but a toothed mouth; the clothing introduces the figure, and what is read is not who he is but which table he has sat down at. The yellow heap emptying from mouth to plate shows that abundance is taken as ordinary at that table, and that prestige is brought not by measure but by the overflowing amount.
Under a wide-brimmed white hat, in the place of a face, there is a toothed, reddish mouth; I cannot make out an eye that looks back. The hat sits in place, a dark jacket on the back, a blue bow tie at the neck, a slender-stemmed glass to the right. Whatever we see of the person amounts to no more than the things worn on top. The only way to recognise this figure is the clothing; we read not who he is, but which table he has sat down at.
Between his mouth and his plate a yellow, coarse-grained flow runs down and gathers on the plate. The plate is already full, what comes lands on top of it, spilling over the edge. Food here is not there to fill a stomach, it stands as a marker. To be able to sit at a table one must first acquire the right hat, the right jacket, the right glass; once these are acquired, what is on the plate loses its importance too, the point being that you are able to heap this much in front of yourself. Abundance is presented as the ordinary state of that table, while scarcity is left outside the picture. Being measured is not counted a virtue here; what brings prestige is that what lies before you is plentiful enough to overflow. The glass, the bow tie, the cloth are all signs of a way of life; whoever carries those signs is counted as inside, whoever does not has no place in this scene.
The purple ornament inside the glass, the tasselled slender fork set beside the plate, the arrangement in which the red cloth is spread on the table; all are parts of a ceremony. Knowing which fork is for which task is itself one of the conditions of admission to that table. What we call class is a form of behaviour learned before any bank balance; it is not bought overnight with money, it is absorbed slowly in childhood, at the table, on visits. No one asks where it was learned, but the moment someone sits down it is clear who has not learned it. The newly rich man holding his spoon wrong gives himself away in spite of the money in his pocket; no one says anything to his face, the door closes on him quietly.
That no eye to look with can be made out struck me as something apart. This body does not look outward, its whole being turned towards the plate before it. Who has been left outside the table, where the bill for this abundance was charged, who brought what is heaped on the plate; none of it is that mouth's concern. The mouth works, the rest has closed over. It is hard, too, to hold something with no face responsible; if there is no gaze before you to address, you do not know whom to ask for the reckoning. Most of us do not even recognise the faces of those who sit in the chairs of the rooms where the great decisions are made; that the decision-maker goes unknown also leaves it uncertain who the decision will be pinned on. A person coming to see no further than his own plate is not a flaw, it is what he pays in return for sitting at that table.
The mouth under the hat goes on flowing, the grains spilling over the edge of the plate coming down towards the red cloth. The end of the cloth hangs down from the table and what is beneath it cannot be seen.
Art History and Comparison
The seated state portrait running from Velázquez to Bacon has been set up, but instead of the scream flinging itself upward it has been turned into a yellow heap that pours from the mouth downward into the bowl. Magritte's face-covering hat has been taken up here; even so, there is no whole face hidden behind the covering, and were it to lift, a scattered mouth would again come out from under it.
A light-coloured, broad-brimmed hat has come down over the middle of the face; its brim cuts off the gaze like a horizontal barrier, and beneath it, in place of a face, there remains a frayed mass in which red and white run into one another. A yellow downpour spills down from the neck, filling the bowl on the table with grains resembling clumps of cornflakes. The red cloth wraps the table like an octagonal island, taking the figure's lower half into itself as well. To present a seated figure frontally like this, with a dark jacket opening onto the chair behind, ties into the oldest construction of the state portrait. Ever since Velázquez's portrait of Onuncu Innocentius, the seated authority is framed by the arms of the chair, his face sits at the centre of the scene, and it is that face which carries his identity. Here the place where the face ought to be has been given over to a scattered mouth, to a wound.
This scattered mouth calls to mind Bacon's screaming popes. His seated figures too are shut inside a dark cage, the mouth opens as wide as it will go for a scream, and that scream flings itself upward and towards the viewer. The mouth here is not shouting. From the place where the sound should issue, something is coming down; the direction of the scream has been reversed, and in place of expelled air there is feed pouring into the bowl. A hat has been placed where the pope's crown would sit, yet this hat does not crown the face, it covers it.
The idea of covering the face with an object had become a rule in Magritte's men; a bowler hat, an apple, a bird suspended in the air is placed in front of the face and our seeing is blocked. In Magritte the blocked face is always intact, a whole face stands behind the covering, it is simply not shown to us. The title's talk of walls of perception invokes this tradition directly. Even so, there is no whole face hidden behind the wall here; were the hat to lift, that same frayed mass would come out from under it once more. No secret has been left to be revealed once the curtain is raised.
In the series' works dated 2026 the surface is most often filled from end to end, with no empty space left. This canvas falls outside that tendency; the green behind is broad and still, and the figure sits alone at the centre. Seated frontally, standing with its bowl before it, this figure from a distance recalls the person at the head of an evening table; yet there are no other guests at the table, nor any mouth that actually eats. Those small cells that years ago built up the bodies have here passed not into a body but into the yellow heap pouring from the mouth; the unit has stayed the same, its task has changed, it no longer produces flesh but becomes food. The purple flower standing in the slender glass on the right and the bead-handled spoon hung on the rim of the bowl are the only signs that say a table has been laid. The hand that would hold the spoon, however, is nowhere to be seen; the arms end in the darkness of the jacket.
Material, Gesture and the Viewer's Experience
The yellow, heaped up lump by lump, rises millimetres above the surface, and in a light coming from the side each piece leaves its own shadow. The hat's oily white is raised in the same way while the green behind stays thin and flat, and this relief is wholly erased once it passes to the screen.
The yellow mass pouring down from the mouth has not soaked into the canvas; it stands raised above the surface. The paint there is not thinned, it is as thick as it came from the tube, like paste; each lump has been set down separately with the tip of a brush or a knife and left just so. Every one of the lumps reads on its own, they do not flow into one another, there are gaps between them. Looking at the surface from the side, you see that these gaps catch shadow, that the paint rises by millimetres. Blue and grey have got into them but are not mixed in; they sit separately within the yellow, the brush having turned them over once and withdrawn its hand.
The green in the background is the exact opposite. Thin and flat, drawn from top to bottom with a broad brush; the brush's edge marks read as vertical tracks. The green covers the canvas but does not swell above it, it stays on the same plane as the surface. At the hat the paint thickens again; the white there is full and oily, gathered by being pushed and pushed with a loaded brush, small ridges built up at its crest. The blue shadow beneath the hat was worked in while the white was still wet, the two colours running into each other at the edge and softening there.
The navy jacket is painted fast. The brush has been flung left to right, up and down; where it passed close to dry, the dark beneath comes back through and leaves grey glints. The pink at the place of the mouth is laid down in short vertical strokes, each stroke separate, red seeping through between them; the paint there is scant, the brush touching the surface and lifting straight off. The red cloth is worked in broad arcs, from the centre outward; towards the edges the paint thins and the weave of the canvas begins to show. The light band at the very bottom is almost bare, the paint having only just grazed it there.
The cream at the rim of the bowl is left in a thick edge, in a single pass; the edge itself is raised like a ridge where the paint has gathered. The handle of the spoon on the right is dotted bead by bead with a fine-tipped brush, each dot a separate touch, the ground showing between them. The light grey triangle on which the spoon rests was worked while wet, pink and purple patches worked into it before it had dried. The blue flower at the upper right is gathered with short touches, pressing and pressing, a dark speck set at its centre. The signature at the lower right is fluid and thin, almost transparent over the red.
A fifty by seventy canvas: hung at arm's length, the yellow mass comes right to the centre of your eye. Looking from half a metre, that mass breaks up and divides into separate lumps, each with its own shadow; step two paces back and the lumps join into a single column pouring downward. To see this relief you have to look from the side, in a light that grazes the surface. On a screen that raised quality dies altogether, the yellow becomes a flat patch, and the information of how many times the hand went there and left paint is erased. On the wall, meanwhile, the same yellow keeps changing with the shadow that falls on it as you pass in front of it.
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