“The lighting up of an aspect is half visual experience, half thought.” — Ludwig Wittgenstein
We approach an image with our eyes, but also with a history. We have recognized forms before, learned to name things and kept faces, places and colours in memory. All of this accompanies our gaze, often without our knowing it. Yet the image in front of us has its own material presence. Its lines meet in a particular way; light emerges in one place rather than another. The painting makes room for our associations, but it can also resist them.
That resistance can be the beginning of a discovery. I think I recognize a figure, then a detail prevents me from settling on it. I look again. What I took for an outline becomes a passage between two forms; an area I thought empty gains depth. My thinking changes through contact with the image, and that change alters my perception in turn. I return to the same colours and marks, but I no longer perceive them as I did before.
It is hard to say exactly where this movement begins. The visible does not come to us as a collection of entirely separate elements for thought to assemble afterwards. Often we already perceive a relationship, a direction, the possibility of a presence. Then an idea takes shape and leads us to look elsewhere in the painting. Looking and thinking work upon one another; neither can claim to have finished the image.
Husserl’s notion of the noema helps us approach what happens here. It concerns an object as it appears within an experience: a landscape as I perceive it, a figure as it begins to take shape for me. The material painting does not vanish behind my interpretation. On the contrary, I return to it to test what I thought I had recognized. Does the form I glimpsed withstand another look? Does another part of the canvas confirm it, or draw it elsewhere?
Husserl also investigates presentification: the ways consciousness relates to what is not directly present, especially in memory and imagination. Before a painting, the pigments are there under our eyes, while what they bring forth belongs to another kind of experience. A colour may recall a place without depicting it; a few gestures may suggest a movement that the still canvas cannot show. The image exists in this encounter between a material presence and what the gaze is led to evoke.
Wittgenstein considers the moment when an aspect suddenly “lights up”. In his duck-rabbit example, the drawing remains the same while we recognize two figures in turn. The change takes place neither on the paper alone nor in a thought that could dispense with the drawing. We begin to follow the lines before us differently. In painting, the shift is rarely so distinct. It may come slowly as one form draws closer to another, a memory intervenes or an initial interpretation ceases to convince us.
Ricœur takes up the idea of seeing as in his reflection on metaphor. An unexpected relationship between words allows us to grasp a resemblance we had not noticed. I find something of this work in painting: a form does not simply receive a meaning already available. It may lead us to change our categories, think a new relationship and return to it with an altered gaze. The image thus participates in the thought it gives rise to.
Neuroscience sheds light on certain moments in this exchange. Dijkstra and colleagues investigated the links between visual imagination, perception and the experienced vividness of a mental image. Studies of ambiguous images, meanwhile, observe shifts in interpretation while the visual information presented remains constant. These experiments do not tell us what a painting means. They remind us that perception also depends on how our brain organizes what it receives.
The differences between these experiences must remain open. Cabbai and colleagues showed that a sensory representation in visual cortex does not always suffice to produce the subjective experience of a mental image. Brain responses matter, and so does the account of the person doing the looking. This is where neuroscience and philosophy can speak to one another most precisely, without claiming to provide a single explanation of an artwork.
When I look at a painting, I sometimes try to understand what is taking shape within it. But sometimes the painting changes my question. I notice something my first idea had prevented me from perceiving. The image remains materially the same; my thinking has changed, and so has my way of seeing it. That new gaze then gives rise to another thought. It is in this exchange between what the image offers, what we perceive and what we think that painting continues to live.
