Louis Marin - Opacity and Transparence in Pictorial Representation

Louis Marin

Opacity and transparence in pictorial representation

http://www.louismarin.fr/wp-content/uploads/sites/39/2019/05/Est_compressed.pdf

Excerpts

[referring to Paul Klee's The R Villa]

The capital red letter R inscribed on a landscape-representation seems to annihilate the illusory depth of the picture, especially the depth created by the road or the river. It makes the painting a simple "show". It is written on the transparent plane of representation and through that letter the whole painting seems to become a set of signs, of pictograms, of ideograms; the whole painting becomes writing. [...]

The plane is no longer transparent; it is opacified at least in the place of the letter. At the same time, there is a reverse tension: the painting by its own representational power seems to convert the letter into a figure [...]

The letter, the written sign is an operator of opacity within a mimetic representation. [...]

Reversely, in the same picture by Klee, there is a kind of attraction of the letter by the representation to convert it into a mimetic figure [...] becomes mimetically transparent, representing a figure which is walking. [...]

Two complementary notions of opacity and transparence of sign and representation whose philosophical characteristics were construed very clearly and powerfully by the 17th century theorists, logicians, grammarians and moralists [...]

The functioning of signs is paradoxical. Let us take the example of reading: when I read, I am not aware of the letters, the graphemes; I am just aware of the idea, the signs of which are the letters shaped into words. Nevertheless, I cannot reach these ideas except through those intermediary signs. Reversely, if I pay attention to the letters themselves, very quickly I could not grasp what they represent. The functioning sign is at the same time present and absent, transparent and opaque.[...]

[...] the founding axioms of representational transparence:

[...] [1] the art of painting produces the duplicate of the thing it chooses as its model, a duplicate so resembling that it is the thing itself which is present on the canvas. [...] [2] painting does not actually produce duplicates of things: its artefacts are only their images more or less looking like them. Added to the model, this artefact replaces it while displaying in this varying resemblance the variety of its resources and effects. [...] representation as re-presentation which, through the painting, comes to replace its model, in addition to it.

[...] to be at the same time present and absent is a good visual and conceptual definition of a transparent thing, a glass pane through which I look at the landscape beyond. I f there are scratches on it, or stains or blotches, I suddenly see the window pane instead of the garden [...]

[...] as a representation, a sign stands for something else. It represents: it makes present again that "absent" term. [...] All representation, as Alberti already defined it for painting, is a kind of miracle which makes an absent friend present through his portrait, and the dead almost alive [...] but only in terms of signs and images. From that point of view, representation as sign, sign as representation in a way indicates the desire of an actual presence. A sign is a trace of that longing to possess reality and at the same time it is a means to fulfill that desire, to accomplish it, but in an imaginary way, a way, nevertheless, that can be more gratifying than reality itself. [...]

[...] The representation's ideal is to be as transparent as possible in order to permit a kind of univocal communication. But is it possible that the matter of sign persists in its function of representing something else; it is possible that the material part of the representation-sign cannot be completely erased and blotted out. [...]

The very fact that any sign presents itself when it represents something else [...] is an essential dimension of representation itself. This is the opacity of representation which constitutes the other side of its signifying process. [...] The signifying process uses a thing to re-present something else to somebody, according to various and more or less precise rules in order to communicate with him or her. [...]

[...]

A sign presents itself while representing something else: this is what I use to call its subject-effect. [...] the sign refers to itself; it shows as a whole, [...] that it is not only a thing but also a sign, that is a representation. [...] Th opacity of representation, the self-presentation of a sign as a sign concerns more precisely the "conditions" of a representation, everything through which a representation has been constructed, made possible and actual, conditions that can be marked or inscribed in one way or another within representation, designating it as representation like for example the frame or the shape of the tavola. [...] the representational process diplays itself within what is represented, as a particular figure or trait of composition or a part of the setting [...] representation presents itself as intentional. [...]

[...]

Such self-presentation of representation can exert influence to modify and affect representation itself and its construction by introducing in it an element which does not belong to the enoncé - for example the story the picture represents - but to its enonciation; the narration thus becomes expressed by a figure which breaks the homogeneity of the narrative representation by an heterogeneity between two levels of the painting. However such a break can be dissimulated by a represented figure which plays two roles and performs two functions, the first one in the "story", the second one in the very process of narrating the story, of conceiving and producing it. [...]

There is somehow a fantasmatic theory of the mimetic representation which has been constructed on the basis of its "transitive dimension" (to represent something), of its transparence, while forgetting its reflexive dimension, its opacity and the modalities of its opacity - its self-presentation.

[...]

(Panofsky's three levels: opacity of representation, phenomenal meaning, preiconographical level)

[...]

(Opacity) means the various ways in which pictorial representation presents itself while representing something else, the various modes of its self-presentation: these modes and ways need to be precisely theorized: they deserve that a history takes into account their variations, transformations and changes. [...] articulate the various modes of opacity within transparence and the various modalities of the relationships which connect opacity and transparence, that is the modalities of the forces and their effects at work within the representational apparatus [...]