THE APPROXIMATION OF THE GAZE: THE WORK YOU NEVER SEE

When everything can become a subject, then nothing truly is. What remains, and what ultimately becomes more relevant, is the way a situation is told, the way it is presented, and the form through which a piece of content is shaped. It is 2026. This is where we have arrived.

The sheer quantity of images, languages, references, and devices through which we read the world has gradually shifted attention away from the subject itself and toward its construction. It is no longer enough to ask what we are looking at. More and more often, what determines the weight of an image, an artwork, or a piece of content is the way that thing is organized, positioned, and made legible.

For an artist, however, this construction is never neutral. Behind an image there may be months or years of research, overlapping references, formal decisions, personal experiences, theoretical positions, attempts, mistakes, obsessions, connections to previous works, and layers of meaning that accumulate until they form an extremely complex structure. The artist inevitably tends to perceive the work through this totality. They know what comes before the work, what supports it, and what, even when it remains invisible, continues to determine it.

The public, by contrast, almost always encounters only the result.

This is where a fundamental distance emerges.

What the artist believes they have constructed and what is actually perceived rarely coincide. Of that original structure, perhaps ten percent gets through, maybe twenty. The rest is lost, simplified, transformed, or replaced by associations that belong to the viewer.

This is not necessarily a lack of attention or ability. Perception works through approximation. We read images through what we already know. We recognize forms, symbols, aesthetics, and situations because we can compare them with a pre-existing archive, both personal and collective. Faced with something new, we inevitably search for something already known through which we can interpret it.

In this sense, the public never receives the work in its entirety. It constructs a possible version of it.

And it is precisely in the space between these two versions, the one produced by the artist and the one reconstructed by the viewer, that a substantial part of the meaning of the work is lost, but also transformed.