Child Moon’s hat

Where Félix literally feels the image looking at him... thereby compelling him to look at it even more closely...

Félix’s Notebook

The image before me, I can feel it, looks at me just as much as I look at it, but what unsettles me, or rather what compels me to remain before it longer than I would have expected, is not so much what it shows as what it seems to know about my own gaze, as though it had been constructed around that very simple weakness almost all of us have before an image: we assume that what is not given to us to see does not yet exist, or no longer exists, and we readily mistake for emptiness what may be nothing more than the limit of our perception.

And so I look at this child embarked in his upturned hat, now grown so vast that it can no longer really be regarded as an article of clothing, or even as a simple object, since it has become a vessel, a boat’s hull, perhaps even a kind of externalised brain in which Child Moon has taken his place without my being able to decide whether he is sheltered there, held there, carried along by it, or already in the process of emerging from it, and I realise that once again it is I, with my habits as a spectator, who immediately tries to name what is happening, as though naming it might be enough to restore me to a position of mastery.

Yet it is precisely here that the drawing resists me, for Child Moon’s eyes are closed, and this detail, which at first I might have interpreted as a sign of deprivation, begins to awaken in me an almost opposite suspicion... If he sees nothing, why does everything around him seem arranged for exploring, recognising, approaching, sensing? Those long filaments emerging from the hat, each ending in a small globe, do not drift like mere ornaments carried away by a current... they resemble eyes displaced from their usual position, eyes that have left the face in order to become tactile, peripheral, hesitant, almost animal, as though seeing now required touching from afar, brushing against, searching within a space whose resistance, however slight, matters as much as its form. And then an idea begins to trouble me even more... perhaps it is not Child Moon who cannot see the world, but I. For the world he explores is not shown to me. I can see very clearly his body, his hands, his bare feet, his vessel, his eye-filaments, the long boat hook he holds with the attentiveness of someone who knows that too violent a contact may damage what he is approaching or throw him himself off balance, but I can see neither the shore towards which he is heading, nor the bottom he is sounding, nor the object he may be trying to recover from that invisible water into which something might have fallen, nor even the water itself, and this great whiteness around him, which I had at first taken for an indeterminate space, begins to seem to me less like the non-existence of a world... than like its absence for me alone. I therefore find myself in a rather uncomfortable position: my eyes are open, his are closed, and yet it is he who is exploring.

The boat hook he holds makes this difference almost tangible, because it belongs to a gesture that sight cannot replace. A navigator uses it to come alongside without causing damage, to gauge a nearness before the vessel is made to suffer it, to hold back, push away, reach towards, but also, when something has fallen into the water and disappeared beneath the surface, to search the bottom for what the eye can no longer reach... It then extends the arm into an element foreign to the body, not in order to master it, but to attempt contact within it, and perhaps this is what affects me most in the image, this way Child Moon has of not entering the unknown as one enters a territory to be conquered, but as one approaches something that might be fragile, or as one searches for what has been lost without yet knowing whether it can be brought back.

I am no longer certain, then, that one should say he is advancing into the unknown, for that formulation assumes that he and I share the same ignorance, whereas nothing assures me that we do. It might be more accurate to say that he is advancing through a world whose visibility I do not possess, and that his closed eyes, his eyes displaced to the ends of their filaments, his hat turned vessel, and his boat hook plunged into that outside denied to me together compose a way of knowing to which I have access only indirectly, through the gestures it produces.

Perhaps that, in the end, is what looks at me... or touches me in this image... not Child Moon himself... nor even those small globes that seem to be looking in every direction... but the gap that suddenly opens between seeing and believing that one sees, between what is not represented and what does not exist, between absence and the invisible... I am beginning to understand that the white surrounding this strange navigation may not be asking to be filled, that it is neither a gap left by the draughtsman nor a setting still waiting to be completed, but the exact place where my own vision comes to an end while something, for Child Moon, continues.

I thought I was looking at an image... and little by little I realise that perhaps it is measuring how far I am capable of looking without seeing.