Before Wesen, I first try to recognize something. Perhaps a flower, or several forms caught in the same movement. I am tempted to separate them, to give them an outline and a name. Yet whenever I return to the canvas, the marks that seemed to confirm that first reading lead me elsewhere. The painting has not changed. My gaze has.
It is this shift that led me to Wittgenstein. In considering the perception of an aspect, he describes a singular experience: we look at the same lines, and suddenly see them differently. Nothing has been added to the drawing, but something has become clear to us. What we see and what we think take part in the same moment. What we know how to recognize guides our gaze; what we look at can, in turn, change our thinking.
The German word Wesen can mean “being” or “essence.” It seems to promise the discovery of what a thing truly is. In the Wittgenstein of Philosophical Investigations, that promise becomes a question. To seek the essence of a thing is not necessarily to lift a veil and reach a hidden reality. We must also consider the words with which we name it, the distinctions we make, and the habits that allow us to say, “this is a flower,” “this is a figure.”
I encountered this question by another route in Daniel Siegel. He describes information as a pattern of energy to which we give symbolic value: it means something to us. Cognition brings such patterns together, distinguishes them, and transforms them. Faced with the almost limitless diversity of what reaches us, our minds form categories. They help us find our way, then become the concepts from which we build our beliefs about the world.
We need this order. Without it, each perception would remain isolated. But a category also brings a kind of certainty that can make us stop looking. As soon as I decide that a pale mark is a petal, I risk missing how it continues into shadow, mingles with a black gesture, or ceases to belong to the flower I thought I recognized.
In Wesen, forms approach the moment when a name becomes possible without allowing themselves to be confined by it. My thinking comes to the image with expectations. It tries to order what it sees. Then the painting confronts it with its own relations, passages, and breaks. I reconsider my first interpretation; another appears without entirely erasing the one before it.
I do not think the painting conceals a final figure waiting to be discovered. What interests me is the encounter in which we feel both the need to make sense and the possibility of beginning again. Perhaps this is the question Wesen holds for me: when do we decide that we know what we are looking at, and what becomes of the image when we agree to look again?
