To begin with, I am not a philosopher and probably never will be. But relying on the writings of Levinas (see here and here) who speaks of the “face” as a door closed to what is beyond or in his terminology the transcendental, is surely a mysterious fact or thought sparking my imagination as a visual artist when drawing portraits and people , perhaps in the same way as medieval artists did when painting the religiousness of their time.
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From another direction but in the same vein of the Levinassian “face” and the “gaze” there is the book by Hagi Kenaan ( “The Ethics of VIsuality, Levinas and the Contemporary Gaze”, see here)….
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…I quote from Catherine Chalier , “‘Hagi Kenaan questions the manner in which the Other’s face shows itself to us […} he analyses with finesse how the face subverts the primacy of consciousness. The face is a reminder of an alterity irreducible to the flow of images that tyrannically occupy our field of vision … To see a face is not to see a phenomenon, but to hear a call addressing me. It is in this difficult, paradoxical and eminently singular optics that ethics upholds itself. Ethics becomes an optics when the vulnerability of the face is perceived as a call for a conversion of the gaze.’ (see here in Review}.
(Catherine Chalier, Professor of Philosophy, University of Paris X – Nanterre)”.
(Catherine Chalier, Professor of Philosophy, University of Paris X – Nanterre)”.
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Anyway, the convergence of many different aspects into a visual work is an intriguing affair, in particular the pixel as a crazy visualization of transcendence and absence.
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korzacsol 