The Trial of the Image

Perhaps the greatest struggle in art is not in seeing but in deciding what can remain seen. If a painting is always a negotiation between presence and absence, between emergence and erasure, then when is it finished?

Guston asks, why stop at all? But if stopping is inevitable, then isn’t every pause in the act of making a kind of failure—a compromise? The question of form, of where to place a shape or a figure, is never resolved; it only shifts. A form is not fixed—it swells, contracts, and sometimes returns to where it began, but it is different because of the journey.

This echoes what we discussed before—the image as something that exists only as it disappears. A painter works against the weight of the familiar, erasing, undoing, reworking, not because the image is incomplete but because it refuses to be completed. Guston calls the canvas a courtroom, where the artist is at once prosecutor and defendant. But if every painting is a trial, does that mean that a painting without judgment, without struggle, disappears at a glance?

Perhaps that is why some works remain alive while others fade into mere decoration. Certain paintings haunt us because they withhold their intentions. Fabritius reveals himself instantly; Rembrandt remains unknowable. The difference is not only in what is painted but in what is paid for. If frustration is one of the great forces in art, then satisfaction is its death.

Is this what makes a painting real? Not its likeness to the world outside, but its resistance to being resolved, its refusal to be pinned down? Guston speaks of those twenty minutes when the painting becomes a living thing—when both the artist and the work reach a state of heightened awareness, a threshold where everything is still shifting. A work that is too certain, that merely completes its own premise, risks suffocating under the weight of its own clarity.

But the question that lingers, the one Guston cannot let go of, is this: Can there be any art at all? If every image must be undone to be real, if every painting must resist its own completion, then is art an act of making—or an act of unmaking?

Best,
İlke