Astrid Jahnsen’s projects follow a procedure, a kind of guiding thread that is both visual and conceptual. Jahnsen takes images from photographs found in different types of publications. She does so through an extreme close-up, in such a way that her photographs reveal to the viewer the dot structure that composes printed and video images. The proximity, the angle, and the often partial reproduction of the original image decontextualize it and allow it to be seen as if with new eyes. This visual aspect of her work functions conceptually as a metaphor: Jahnsen is not only exposing the hidden structure that gives form to images; in doing so, she also offers a clue for understanding, again as if with new eyes, how images are conceptually constructed and the social and cultural framework they conceal.

In The Lost Gaze, Jahnsen photographs some of the illustrations from a collection of books dedicated to the great masters of painting that she inherited from her grandmother and read as a child. As expected, all the artists in the collection were men, and the presence of women was limited to those portrayed by the painters. The Lost Gaze reveals the structure of male dominance, but charged with more subtle nuances about what it means to see and to be seen.

At first, the project sought to reflect on the illusion these paintings create for viewers: that it is these women who are looking at us, when in fact what we see is also—and perhaps above all—how these artists looked at their models. The absence of women painters in the collection only made this fact more evident. Jahnsen therefore attempted to photograph the painted women from a point of view that might come closer to how they could have seen themselves while posing. This is why several of the images make use of reflections in mirrors or simulate the model’s gaze directed toward parts of her own body.

Jahnsen’s images in this project also reveal, at times in a disturbing way, glimpses of the violence implied in the model’s vulnerability and exposure before the painter. And, as the other side of the coin, they lead us to imagine the modesty involved in posing nude or semi-nude. Yet there is, in some of these photographs, a striking delicacy, especially in those in which it is difficult to identify what Jahnsen has taken from the original painting, as if the discovery of their own gaze were a mystery, or allowed us to glimpse a kind of void.

The attempt to recover the lost gaze of these women is, most likely, a failed endeavor. We will never be able to see through their eyes, nor think what they thought, nor feel what they felt. But the attempt itself is eloquent about what new perspectives can teach us regarding the social and cultural assumptions—as well as the intimate and emotional ones—that lie hidden behind the fleeting nature of a simple gaze.

CARLO TRIVELLI

The Lost Gaze

In my grandmother’s library, which I used as a child to study and understand the world, there was a collection of books titled Diamantes del Arte. In my ignorance, I believed that Eugène Delacroix, because of how his French name sounded in Spanish, was the only woman artist in the collection, and I remember always taking that book to look at his paintings.

When I inherited my grandmother’s library and returned to those books, I realized that this collection, in which there were no women artists, had been one of my earliest references. Perhaps this is where a sense of rebellion began: the feeling of being confronted with a reality I could not change because it was larger than me.

Yet within their pages, most of the figures depicted were women.

Working from these images and using my camera, I attempt to recreate the gaze that these women had of themselves within the history of their image, placing myself in their perspective or using mirrors. However, the gesture remains only a gesture: it is impossible to recover that gaze within history.