Ma gritte’s “The Human Condition” can be regarded as a still life on a different scale. Like a magician, tricks are played out through or behind cloths of many sorts - curtains, handkerchiefs, etc - we must be a willing, believing, yet skeptical audience thrilled to have paid our entry fees. The artist is a kind of presdigitator making things appear, disappear, and change forms before our eyes. In this painting, despite the density of illusionistic form, what we are looking at is a depiction of a space no deeper than an inch or two - we gaze upon a rendering of two flat surfaces - one rumpled, folded, suspended and the other tightly stretched and covered in paint - here, in this tension, is the beating heart of painting. Considered this way, Peale’s work collapses painting’s core - it exposes the tension between the demands and riches of a two-dimensional surface, and the push into pictoral or illusionistic space. It shows a trompe l’oeil napkin hiding a version of a 1772 James Barry painting. This figure painting turns out not to be a figure painting but a still life painting. Just as Venus has had a curtain drawn on her vivid sensuality, we too have had the wool pulled over our eyes.
The meaning of a work is not located purely in the objects depicted, rather it is to be found in the space between the concrete, identifiable, nameable objects and the intentions of the artist solidified in the artist’s chosen medium. (Is she even aware that we are here?) The cloth reveals the deception to be a type of deception common to all painting - it is a deceit that the subject-matter depicted is the sole delivery mechanism of a picture’s meaning. As much as we are denied direct gaze at the naked figure before us, the ostensible subject behind the curtain is also protected from our scrutiny.
The cloth itself is rendered with great care and tenderness making this agent of deception (the cloth), the true subject of this figure painting. She is barely visible behind a curtain suspended before her. We are presumably presented with an image of a nude woman. In Raphael Peale’s painting of 1822, the curtain is rather opaque. We as viewers, as spectators are afforded the privilege to suss things out from both sides. In 1957, Marcel Duchamp identified a “transference from the artist to the spectator in the form of an esthetic osmosis taking place through the inert matter, such as pigment, piano or marble.” The cloth in the painting and the painting itself is such inert matter. The curtain defines a threshold between the object under consideration and its audience - a painting and its meaning (its relevance) represents a threshold between the artist’s mind and the viewers mind. The curtain presumes to reveal its subject but, in the end, the cloth is the subject-matter, the cloth contains the meaning.The very fact that it conceals and reveals simultaneously gets at an essential truth at the heart of painting’s significance - the viewer must think from both sides of the curtain. In the story of Zeuxis and Parrhasios, where Zeuxis, one of two competing painters painted grapes so convincingly that birds pecked at them while the other painter, Parrhasios painted a curtain so realistically that it tricked his fellow artist, it is not insignificant that the competing paintings were concealed from view beneath a cloth.
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