The Martine De Souza-Dassault Brain Art Gallery

The blurring of the photographic image and the dissolution of reality into its primary and raw elements through stain, form, and material are used as tools by Dan Orimian, the painter and son, to express the inconceivable gap between observing his mother’s present image and the gaping and inaccessible space left in her. The artwork brings together the perspectives of the artist, his mother, and the viewers, capturing another perceptual gap as described by the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan when distinguishing between sight and gaze: The emergence of the mother figure as perceived by the visual system undergoes the interpretive gaze of the son as returned to him through her blurred, unfocused, frightened eyes, which can no longer recognize her world. The works manage to illustrate the twilight stage in the transition between the symbolic and the realistic dimensions, between the social order and the chaos from which things came and to which all things return.