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Lot Essay
In her works of viewers looking at paintings which have become some of the most recognizable imagery of her oeuvre, Annie Cabigting displaces the focus from the painting to the viewer, interrogating the very nature of perception, attention, and subjectivity. In the connection between viewer and art, between the perceiver and the perceived, between the mortal human and the inanimate object, what imprints of sensation come to fore, what thunderbolt of insight is generated? In fact, even before asking these question, we need to conduct this crucial inquiry: What, after all, constitutes 'looking'?
Their backs turned to us and wrapped only by air and light, the spectating figures of Cabigting's paintings are always shown thoroughly absorbed in the act of looking at the paintings before them, such is their single-mindedness, transforming the experience of viewing art. In this particular work, the painting in question is Paul Gauguin's Cavaliers sur la Plage II (Riders on the Beach) created in 1902, a year before the Post- Impressionist master died, and is publicly displayed at the Folkwang Museum in Essen, Germany.
Her blouse in a blaze of flora, her hands in her pockets, the central figure looks at Gauguin's work with skepticism, if not intemperance. How is she judging this tableau of horses, beach, and curvature of waves? Presuming that she knows Gauguin's personal history, what are her thoughts concerning the artist's demise at Atuona in French Polynesia where the painting is set? What are her notions of sense and time being affirmed or abolished, by looking at the natives being painted by a traveler-painter from that early period.
In subjectifying the figure of painting by asking these questions, by assigning to her an agency, we are in turn placing ourselves in the shoes of those who may look at us each time we look at a painting. What has long been considered as a solitary, quasi-religious activity has now become an object of scrutiny and of surveillance. In looking at Cabigting's work, we can no longer pretend that we are safe from the prying eyes of others, since we ourselves are quick to bring up a motive to seeing.
It is in this doubling that the more rigorous conceptual forays of Annie Cabigting's works are established: the appropriation of the iconic painting by way of painting, the correspondence between the subject and the flesh-and-blood viewer, the mirroring of the illusory space of the painting and the real space that surrounds it, and, in this particular work, the repetition of the frame. A platonic conundrum, the painting is thrice removed from the symbolic world (the painting is a copy of Gauguin's copy of reality), with the added appearance of the one who looks.
Through these repetitions—from the world of the painting to our world and back again—do we recognize that the medium of painting is not just about mimesis but a certain re-ordering of the variables of experience, a displacement in the form of recognition, a vivid—and vivifying— awareness of presence. The world is but a shimmering constellation of points of view, and that, as the works of Annie Cabigting tell us, we crystallize in the gaze of others, even if we are not looking.
Their backs turned to us and wrapped only by air and light, the spectating figures of Cabigting's paintings are always shown thoroughly absorbed in the act of looking at the paintings before them, such is their single-mindedness, transforming the experience of viewing art. In this particular work, the painting in question is Paul Gauguin's Cavaliers sur la Plage II (Riders on the Beach) created in 1902, a year before the Post- Impressionist master died, and is publicly displayed at the Folkwang Museum in Essen, Germany.
Her blouse in a blaze of flora, her hands in her pockets, the central figure looks at Gauguin's work with skepticism, if not intemperance. How is she judging this tableau of horses, beach, and curvature of waves? Presuming that she knows Gauguin's personal history, what are her thoughts concerning the artist's demise at Atuona in French Polynesia where the painting is set? What are her notions of sense and time being affirmed or abolished, by looking at the natives being painted by a traveler-painter from that early period.
In subjectifying the figure of painting by asking these questions, by assigning to her an agency, we are in turn placing ourselves in the shoes of those who may look at us each time we look at a painting. What has long been considered as a solitary, quasi-religious activity has now become an object of scrutiny and of surveillance. In looking at Cabigting's work, we can no longer pretend that we are safe from the prying eyes of others, since we ourselves are quick to bring up a motive to seeing.
It is in this doubling that the more rigorous conceptual forays of Annie Cabigting's works are established: the appropriation of the iconic painting by way of painting, the correspondence between the subject and the flesh-and-blood viewer, the mirroring of the illusory space of the painting and the real space that surrounds it, and, in this particular work, the repetition of the frame. A platonic conundrum, the painting is thrice removed from the symbolic world (the painting is a copy of Gauguin's copy of reality), with the added appearance of the one who looks.
Through these repetitions—from the world of the painting to our world and back again—do we recognize that the medium of painting is not just about mimesis but a certain re-ordering of the variables of experience, a displacement in the form of recognition, a vivid—and vivifying— awareness of presence. The world is but a shimmering constellation of points of view, and that, as the works of Annie Cabigting tell us, we crystallize in the gaze of others, even if we are not looking.