Painting as Time Warper

Light as the Pre-eminent Vehicle of Reality and Information

Author: Ed Mirza

Genre: Speculative philosophy / Aesthetics / Metaphysical reflection

Themes: Painting, light, perception, memory, time, consciousness, animism

Archival edition: Zenodo / Philosophy record: PhilPapers

The Painted Room as Portal

Certain paintings possess an odd immediacy. They do not merely represent a room; they seem, for an instant, to admit the viewer into its atmosphere.

This quality is particularly powerful in Velázquez’s Las Meninas and in Vermeer’s letter-reading interiors. In Las Meninas, the chamber appears to continue beyond the painted surface. The distant doorway, the mirror, the receding walls and the figures looking beyond the visible scene create the sensation that the frame has intersected a room already in existence. The painting does not seem to begin at its edges. It appears to open upon a larger spatial reality.

In Vermeer, the effect is quieter but perhaps still more enveloping. Light enters through a window, falls upon a wall, touches a face and moves into shadow. The figures, furniture and empty intervals are held within one continuous atmosphere. The room seems to possess temperature, silence and air.

The viewer does not merely learn what such a room looked like. Its volume forms around the eye. The position of the window can be sensed; the depth of the opposite wall becomes almost bodily apparent; the silence acquires an implied acoustic character.

Something approaching the experience of being there becomes possible.

The sensation can become stronger when the frame of the painting is hidden. By looking through a small opening made with the fingers, or by otherwise obscuring the surrounding wall and the visible edges of the picture, some of the evidence that the image is a flat object is suppressed. The represented space then exerts greater authority.

The frame says: object.

The obscured frame says: world.

For a moment, the distinction between looking at a painted room and looking into one begins to weaken.

The Room Reconstituted

Proust describes a related experience of lying in darkness as a child. When even the narrow strip of light beneath the door had disappeared, the identity of the room became uncertain. Another room from an earlier period of life could form itself around him: the position of its furniture, the direction of the window and the orientation of his own body within the remembered space.

The withdrawal of external light seemed to intensify an inner illumination.

With the visible evidence of the present room suppressed, the remembered room acquired greater authority. It did not return as an inventory of objects or a list of facts. It returned as an enclosing spatial reality.

The remembered room temporarily displaced the physical room.

A place can arise in memory with such completeness that consciousness appears briefly to occupy it. Entrances, distances, furniture and points of orientation organise themselves around the remembering person. The physical room remains where it is, yet another spatial order becomes experientially active.

Such experiences raise a difficult question. Is the remembered room merely an internal model constructed in the present, or does remembering constitute some form of renewed participation in the former place?

The first explanation is psychologically sufficient.

The second belongs to the speculative territory of animism.

A Room with a Voice

Something comparable can occur when listening to the early phonograph recordings of Enrico Caruso.

Very little direct spatial information appears to survive in such recordings. What remains is a voice transformed by primitive machinery: compressed, metallic, distant and surrounded by noise. Yet around that voice, a room begins to assemble itself.

The recording horn is imagined. A distance is sensed between the singer and the apparatus. Musicians, technicians and attentive witnesses seem to occupy positions beyond the audible trace. A whole historical atmosphere gathers around the performance.

Sound supplies the movement of the moment: breath, cadence, force, hesitation and emotional direction. Consciousness constructs an inhabited space around it.

The recording does not literally contain the studio walls. Nevertheless, it has retained enough of an event to make an absent room inwardly present.

Sound returns the gesture of the moment.

Light returns its room.

The impression produced by sound is generally softer and more transitional than the impression produced by painting. The voice first acts upon the listener; the room then begins to form around it. Much must be inferred, completed or imagined.

Language operates at a further degree of removal. A verbal description can recreate a room, but it does so sequentially. One sign follows another. The wall is introduced, then the window, then the furniture, then the human figure. The inward scene is gradually assembled.

Painting presents the relations together.

In sound, the room gathers around the trace.

In language, the room is constructed through successive signs.

In painting, the trace already possesses the organisation of a room.

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The Common Element of Memory and Participation: Inner Visual Representation

Painting, memory, sound and verbal description all appear to depend upon a common faculty: the ability of consciousness to construct an inner visual field.

When a person considers getting onto a bus, the thought rarely exists as a bare row of words. Some visual suggestion of the action forms inwardly: the bus beside the pavement, the movement towards its door, the step upwards, the presence of other passengers or the anticipated destination.

The representation may be vivid or faint. Yet it remains dimly palpable within the inward visual field associated with the visual cortex.

More abstract words may also acquire inward equivalents. Justice, history, danger or freedom do not correspond to single visible objects, yet they call forth visual arrangements, directions, balances, memories, scenes or symbolic forms.

The Link Between Light and Intellect

Thought appears continually to bring things before an inward visual faculty so that their relationships may be apprehended.

Thinking itself may be regarded as an act of comparing successive images and arriving at further, conclusive images on their basis.

The traditional inner or third eye may be understood in this way: as evoking this strange and not readily definable inner visual field, which persists even in darkness and when the eyes are closed.

Even congenital blindness does not prevent the development of inward spatial representation. Shapes, positions and relations can still be conceived and manipulated without remembered eyesight.

An argument becomes clear. A difficulty is illuminated. A person acquires insight. A subject comes into focus. When a relationship is understood, the ordinary expression is: “I see.”

A harmful idea also seems to persist in a similar way: as a recurring image of some kind, a memory or construction that is retained and around which other visions and images become organised.

The visual constant running through these strange experiences of participation—in instances belonging to another time or location, or even to an entirely imagined scene or contingency—compellingly suggests that painting and visual representation must be among the most effective vehicles through which this participatory experience can occur.

The impression produced by sound is generally softer and more transitional than the impression produced by painting. The voice first acts upon the listener; the room then begins to form around it. Much must be inferred, completed or imagined.

Language operates at a further degree of removal. A verbal description can recreate a room, but it does so sequentially. One sign follows another. The wall is introduced, then the window, then the furniture, then the human figure. The inward scene is gradually assembled.

Memory as a Visual Experience

Another aspect of this is memory, since memories provide the background against which experience is measured and understood. In the same way that recordings of distant rooms or scenes—even imaginary scenes—are organisations of material acting as methods of preserving those scenes, an internal memory is a similar organisation of inward representations.

Memories, too, appear to be composed primarily of visual components. Even the recollection of words spoken or of a bodily sensation is commonly accompanied by some form of visual representation.

Memory is closely related to recording. These organised records of events, contingencies, scenes or experiences are external arrangements of matter that may themselves be called memories: outward repositories into which information is set, much as it is set within internal memory.

It is also memory that causes a human being to experience a sense of linear time, of before and after. Memory preserves the sense of progression in a human life. It is the function which, as already suggested, is deeply connected with visual organisation and which holds together the sense of sequence and succession that creates the experience of the arrow of time. Memory holds perception and subjective experience together, perhaps in something of the same way that the body and the celestial world are held together by forms of memory.

Paradoxically, this same memory, preserving the experience of an individual arrow of time, might also cause the individual to forget a wider field of experience, particularly if the universe is understood as a structure of solid time.

Memory is therefore closely related to, and perhaps almost synonymous with, recording. It preserves selected relations from an event and makes them available for later activation.

It would thus seem that, for human beings, thoughts, memories and even dreams are composed of one and the same substance: visual representations within the inner cortex, fixed entities or images that interact with one another, creating syntheses and further reflective images.

Dreams combine remembered places, imagined situations, fears, desires and fragments of perception into environments that, while they last, are experienced as inhabited realities. A dream room may never have existed physically, yet it acquires entrances, distances, inhabitants and atmosphere.

In much the same way, the dream produces an immersive and participatory experience, even a momentary forgetting of the former parameters that integrate the sense of one’s previous life. Something of this same loosening occurs on the threshold of entering the frame of a Vermeer painting.

Memory and the Arrow of Time

A vanished room becomes active within a later room. A dead singer alters the emotional and spatial experience of a listener born decades after the performance. A painting created centuries ago reorganises the perception of a living viewer.

Memory simultaneously constructs the arrow of time and makes it porous.

Different forms of memory preserve the apparent separation of moments while allowing one moment to act inside another.

This apparent contradiction may arise because memory does not preserve the entire structure of time. It preserves a local sequence: the path travelled by one consciousness through a larger reality.

If time possesses a more complete and solid structure, subjective memory may constitute a selective forgetting of that whole. Consciousness remembers enough to experience continuity, but not enough to experience all moments as simultaneously belonging to one existent order.

The arrow may therefore describe how time is lived from within.

It may not describe the complete nature of existence itself.

It begins to appear that, while any recording can create an extension beyond its original moment, allowing another person in an entirely different moment and arrow of time to participate in it, painting and visual media may provide the most granular and receptive means of creating such participation. This is fitting, since the effect itself is achieved through the creation of a visual representation within the visual cortex of the receiver.

If time is indeed solid, and individual human perceptions of life as arrows of time are selective progressions and organisations within it, could these recordings—and especially paintings—be organising a field that exists outside these discrete experiences of time, allowing transmission between them at a lower resolution?

Animism

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Animism takes the view that any organisation or entity—arguably any arrangement of materials, and therefore any form of recording or memory—is extended through its representations, impressions and records. These contain the means by which others may participate in the original memory itself.

This can occur even through accidental resemblance or entirely unintentional records, such as an imprint or a shadow cast. Animism denotes a world of experiences infinitely interwoven with such extensions and participations, at every level of experience and in every detail. This extension may be described as energy, trace, influence, memory or participation. The word matters less than the phenomenon: the sense that things continue to act beyond the limits of their immediate material presence.

A time-honoured demonstration of the animistic tendency in human beings is to ask whether someone would feel entirely comfortable putting out the eyes of a photograph of a loved person with a needle. There is a sense of interconnectedness that human beings appear to find it impossible to discard completely.

The image has acquired some degree of participation in the represented being.

Within such a world, even an imagined room possesses a degree of being.

Once formed in consciousness, it can be revisited, altered, communicated, feared, desired or forgotten. It can influence behaviour in physical places. It may be less materially dense than an actual room, but it is not therefore nothing.

Recording as Extended Participation

In this sense, if painting is the pre-eminent instance of recording and transmitting information between times, it may be seen as opening the highest-resolution portal for this active participation.

Conversely, in a world of solid time, at the moment when Proust felt himself to be inside the remembered room—whether that room had been physically real or entirely imaginary—the room itself might also be imagined as feeling his presence pressing upon the limit of its experience, almost as a ghost within this lower-resolution penumbra.

Participation would not be one-way within solid time.

A recording retains selected relations from an event and enables them to act elsewhere.

Writing preserves the order of words. Sound recording preserves vibrations organised by a voice or instrument. Photography preserves a pattern of light. Painting preserves an arrangement consciously interpreted and remade by a human observer.

The Penumbra of Participation

Individual lives appear to proceed along largely separate arrows of time. Each consciousness occupies its own succession of moments. Another person’s past cannot simply be entered, and a vanished room cannot be physically reoccupied in its former hour.

Yet the separation may not be absolute.

A painting, recording or remembered place may be understood as creating a strange field within which otherwise unrelated arrows of time can interact, however dimly: a region in which discrete temporal experiences partially coalesce.

The original event remains where it is within time.

The later act of attention occurs elsewhere.

Yet a relation becomes active between them.

A Register Outside Linear Time

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The traces carried by paintings, memories and recordings may belong to a register that is not fully contained by subjective linear time.

The record is located in the present, but what it activates belongs partly to another moment.

The resulting experience is neither wholly past nor wholly present.

It is an overlap.

Such overlaps are ordinarily dim. The former event does not return with complete material force. Participation occurs through atmosphere, recognition, imagination, emotion and inward spatial organisation.

Nevertheless, even a weak connection suggests that the boundaries of subjective time may not be absolute.

The penumbra is faint, but it exists.

Light as Absolute

Light has commonly been regarded, as far back as surviving records extend, as some form of absolute and defining first source.

It possesses an immediacy echoed by the extraordinary speed at which it travels.

All these forms of inward representation share a profound relationship with light.

Light is the most immediate expression of presence. It reveals surfaces, establishes distance, separates one object from another and allows a world to become perceptually organised. It is, of course, the primary instrument of visual experience, even though that experience is curiously perceived inwardly within the visual cortex.

Light has repeatedly been associated with creation, truth, revelation, health, goodness, love and understanding. These associations are not entirely arbitrary. The King James Bible, for example, holds that, in the creation of all that is, God said: “Let there be light.”

Creation itself is repeatedly imagined as illumination. The beginning of the universe is popularly pictured as an eruption of radiance. Spirit is conceived as light. Fire signifies life, transformation and the birth of new forms.

Even information is frequently expressed through contrasts resembling light and darkness: signal and no signal, on and off, one and zero.

Since light appears to present itself as a field within which existence becomes perceptually suspended and organised, it follows that light and visual organisation might provide the most porous line of transmission between otherwise discrete lines of consciousness, or arrows of time.

Light may be the most receptive vehicle through which otherwise discrete moments can transmit their organisation across time.

Painting, as Opposed to Photography, in Transmitting Between Times

Painting is not merely the mechanical registration of light.

The painter observes, selects, remembers and organises in the act of recording. A situation is received through vision but is also interpreted through emotion, bodily sensation, intelligence, memory and attention.

These elements become concentrated in the movement of the hand.

A brushstroke may record more than the local colour of a wall. It may carry the wall’s distance, stillness, temperature and relation to the human figure beside it. It may contain the painter’s judgement concerning which aspect of the scene is essential and which may be allowed to disappear.

The painter also possesses a vast faculty of inner representations, set against a background of infinitesimal visual impressions, all composing the painter’s memory and individual arrow of time.

A photograph may contain more raw optical data.

A painting may contain a greater concentration of humanly significant information.

The painter does not simply preserve what was visible. The painter creates an order through which the visible situation may become experientially active again.

This may allow painting to reveal not merely the visible surface of a moment but the perceptual field through which the moment was experienced.

The painter records both the scene and an act of seeing.

Painting may therefore possess a peculiar capacity to organise traces from the wider penumbra surrounding an event. It can draw together physical appearance, memory, interpretation, emotional emphasis and spatial experience.

It records light already altered by consciousness.

The painter is recording a concentration of previous meanings, reflections and significances, which move before the inward mind during the act of painting.

The Immediate Participatory Effect of the Painted Room

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This may explain the peculiar force of Vermeer and Velázquez.

In their paintings, space seems not simply depicted but retained. The room appears to possess continuing volume.

Figures occupy a shared atmosphere. Distances unfold with an immediacy greater than historical information alone could produce.

The implied sound of the room can almost be heard. The hardness of the floor, the coolness of the walls, the weight of a dress and the silence between figures become perceptually available.

The effect is not merely that the past has been accurately described.

The viewer appears to stand at its threshold.

Language must assemble the room through successive signs. Sound allows the room to gather around a temporal trace. Painting presents the principal relations together.

The whole room arrives at once.

This simultaneity may account for the strange immediacy of the experience. The room does not have to be consciously rebuilt object by object. Its organisation acts upon perception as a field.

A particular arrangement of marks creates the sensation that another arrangement of matter, light and consciousness remains active behind it.

Painting as Time Warper

Painting may therefore be more than a representation of an absent moment.

It may be an instrument through which one moment participates in another.

The original room is not recovered in its physical completeness. Yet something of its perceptual order crosses the interval. Light, darkness, distance, attention and atmosphere interact with another nervous system.

Between them stands the organised light of the image.

A Larger World of Light

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This would imply that a painting provides a window into a world larger than that of the discrete moments of subjective linear time and separate arrows of experience.

Light appears to be the primary medium through which the visible organisation of an event becomes transmissible.

When light is consciously ordered in painting, an unusual density of experience can cross the apparent separation between moments.

The distinction between remembering a room and entering it, between seeing a past moment and standing within its atmosphere, becomes unexpectedly thin.

In certain representational paintings—perhaps those created with a particular intensity of attention, perhaps the strongest paintings—it may seem to dissolve altogether.

Light falls upon pigment.

The painted room becomes present.

Another consciousness participates.

And for an instant, the hermetic seal of linear time appears to open.

It may be that further openings within consciousness—perhaps within the inner visual field so often invoked here—permit a higher-resolution entrance into this larger world.