On blindness, 2025, Nara Roesler, New York, exhibition views
2025. Nara Roesler
6.12–8.9.2025
Nara Roesler, New York
[Brígida Baltar, Carlito Carvalhosa, Antonio Dias, Juliana Frontin, Fernanda Gomes, Thiago Hattnher, Jac Leirner, Leonilson, Robert Mapplethorpe, Agnes Martin, Paulo Monteiro, Tomie Ohtake, Bernardo Ortiz, Solange Pessoa, Armando Reverón, Milton Resnick, Mira Schendel, Paula Siebra, João Trevisan, Ben K. Voss, Danh Vō]
On blindness
“Your name is a secret bird.”
– Ernesto Kavi, La luz impronunciable, 2016
“I have grown to believe that a really intelligent man makes an indifferent painter, for painting requires a certain blindness – a partial refusal to be aware of all the options.”
– Peter Greenaway, Mrs. Talmann’s line in the movie The Draughtsman’s Contract, 1982
“Every time a draftsman lets himself be fascinated by the blind, every time he makes the blind a theme of his drawing, he projects, dreams, or hallucinates a figure of a draftsman […]. Or more precisely still, he begins to represent a drawing potency at work, the very act of drawing. He invents drawing.”
– Jacques Derrida, Memoires of the Blind: The Self-Portrait and Other Ruins, 1990
The empathic drill of blindness—the reflective exercise of unfolding seen images into their unseen cores and possibilities—historically has served as a refuge for reflecting on language, image, and time. Here, I do not refer to blindness as a biological state or a pathological diagnosis—though I mention in this text biographical examples of some giants whose fates crossed with it. Instead, blindness is presented as a poetic catalyst, a lyrical tool, and an expansion of denotative vision. (And when I mention the so-called “biologically blind,” I do so by believing that they saw, paradoxically, through this second hypothetical type of blindness.) To keep the eyes open and see nothing but the undefined, to shut the eyes and see everything.
Could the interruption of vision be a condition of visibility? Would this stoppage dissolve the consecrated cultural construct of mimetic representation, the semiotic potential of images finding its way other than the very narrow band of light radiation frequencies burnt on human retinas? The declination of the sight seems to enable other possibilities: the vision in the realm of the obscure, the exceeded, the metaphysical, the tactile, the minimum, the labyrinthian, the longed-for. In an ocularcentric culture, hyperfast optical micromovements jostle the lyrical pace and the fruition of the universe beyond layers of immediate visibility.
Jorge Luis Borges, the Argentine writer who tamed labyrinths, tigers, and libraries, lived blind through the last decades of his life. “That slow nightfall, that slow loss of sight, began when I began to see,” he wrote, prolonging his blindness until his own origin. Borges is one of many who presented blindness as a poetic catalyst, as aforementioned, as a possibility of perceiving the world beyond vision. Among the memories of certain colors that refused to stop inhabiting his mind and vaguely his eyes, Borges said that yellow remained faithful to him. It remained, of course, as a color, but as a present entity, visible even amidst blindness, which made itself known through memory, not through vision. The perception of things that are initially understood in the realm of visuality and become inhabitants only in the expansive terrains of memory is one of the centers of gravity of this exhibition. To see something through memory, through the cognitive mechanisms that form an infinite labyrinth, and not only through the eyes, the attentive receptacle of the soul.
Borges listed certain colors that accompanied him in the undefined world of blindness, again highlighting yellow and the confusion with white, which, being white, ironically and metachromatically, disappeared or merged with gray. This camouflage of gray evokes the tactile sensation of something mineral, as if the memory of color proposed other circuits of neurons and synapses, making one feel, if only for an instant, the touch of an irregular and cold stone, almost metallic, or grains of very dry sand slipping through one’s fingers and blending into sparkles of yellow, gray, and white. It resembles touching the sand of the desert, as Borges also did, mentioning that he moved the Sahara by shifting a handful of its sand. It is akin to seeing—or not seeing—the rough white landscapes of Armando Reverón, who constructed heaven and earth with the force of the sand grains illuminated by the blinding sun at the zenith near the equator.
In a few dozen paintings produced between 1959 and 1962, Tomie Ohtake was interested in the collapse of vision through the formation of blind spots in the anatomy of the human eye. They evoke, in a certain way, the confusion transmitted to the brain by the optic nerves when we close our eyes with great intention, when we look at a bright light for an extended period, or press our eyeballs under our eyelids for some time with a certain amount of pressure. Shadow and light amalgamate, and color and darkness intertwine. Things move in undefined gestures, bordering on the formless: we see, but we question whether these images are truly of the nature of the visible or if they are experiences of other magnitudes, partially apprehended by vision. For Ohtake, the experience of painting blindfolded is not merely a graphic endeavor; it is a conceptual operation that interrogates whether painting is possible beyond pictorial recollection, paradoxically constituting its body with evidence of blindness.
Borges said that his blindness began when he began to see until, at the age of 56, the moment came when he knew he had lost his vision—his vision as a reader and writer. The eyes of Alice Neel—who also read and wrote so many images through her paintings—are placidly closed in the portrait made by Robert Mapplethorpe. That moment of momentary and voluntary blindness, subtle as slowly blinking the eyes or closing them for a few seconds, generates, by not seeing anything, the sudden and ghostly appearance of all the images that those eyes have ever seen and created. The surrendered, relinquished eyes, in ecstasy.
The rhythmic graphite lines on paper drawn by Agnes Martin organize, in an infinite spatial desert, a completely blind mental and emotional space. The hand, therefore, follows as an extension of the mind, imagining (in the sense of “endowing with an image”) an inner universe that rejects the cognitive-cultural construction that horizontal lines marking a plane are suggestions of a landscape—whether toward its construction or its disappearance. The attempt to reconstruct an image through memory, or an idea from a mental image—analogous to the etymological intention of “image” that passes through the Latin “imago” to the Greek “eidos,” from which “idea” derives—seems to be pursued in Thiago Hattnher’s painting. In it, where the silhouette of a floral branch is almost a bygone memory, the superposition of chromatic fields composes a new image by suggesting the erasure of others, as in an inverse activity of prospecting, making it invisible by adding visible layers.
The ironic wonder surrounding the optical phenomenon itself, so complex yet so simple, leads Fernanda Gomes to create a painting of pure light: a cannon of square cut-out light is projected onto two canvases of raw linen with subtly different tones. The interplay of chromatic interactions by Josef Albers and the formal and geometric operations by Kazimir Malevich yield to the simplicity of the gesture, the linen bathed in light, and the light received by the linen. Such a straightforward operation seems so complete that it rejects any approximation: it resembles nothing else and lacks nothing. Blindness can therefore be total vision.
Prostrating herself on the worn steps of the sacred staircase, wrapped in a pitch-black cocoon, Solange Pessoa embodies the very essence of faith: the act of believing without seeing. She names her work—and, consequently, the protagonist in the video and herself—Cornelius: the first gentile converted to Christianity. She imagines (“becomes an image”) herself as one of the twelve stone prophets sculpted in the early 19th century who, despite being blind and having soapstone retinas, have observed the dawn and dusk on the winding mountains of Minas Gerais for centuries. They have witnessed countless other conversions and believe in the memory of images.
A whitish, flat object that floats, a sea of recognizable signs with varying degrees of translucence, through which one can see with a certain amount of negotiation. This labyrinth of letters—a threshold object in terms of visibility—Mira Schendel’s Graphic Object questions whether it is, ultimately, an obstacle to the vision of what lies behind it or a kind of lens through which one sees. Does the cacophony amplify or silence? Does it carry the weight of a storm of letters or the lightness of the mist that Brígida Baltar tries to capture with glass globes?
In this essay on blindness, twenty-one artists help us imagine what the images of this blind world might be like—or, as Roland Barthes put it in his analysis of photographs, the “blind field” created (or divined) when desire overflows depiction, activating memories and desires after being punctured by a sharp, personal impact of an image. This imaginary sight would then be the result of two seemingly opposite vectors: imagination as a phenomenon that forces its way out of the mind, while sight provides the path for various things to enter the mind. It is no coincidence, therefore, that blindness and mourning, or even mournful love, intersect: one loves what is no longer seen, even though it remains so present.
Text originally published at the exhibition On blindness at Nara Roesler, New York, on view from June 12 to August 9, 2025
Nara Roesler, New York
[Brígida Baltar, Carlito Carvalhosa, Antonio Dias, Juliana Frontin, Fernanda Gomes, Thiago Hattnher, Jac Leirner, Leonilson, Robert Mapplethorpe, Agnes Martin, Paulo Monteiro, Tomie Ohtake, Bernardo Ortiz, Solange Pessoa, Armando Reverón, Milton Resnick, Mira Schendel, Paula Siebra, João Trevisan, Ben K. Voss, Danh Vō]
On blindness
“Your name is a secret bird.”
– Ernesto Kavi, La luz impronunciable, 2016
“I have grown to believe that a really intelligent man makes an indifferent painter, for painting requires a certain blindness – a partial refusal to be aware of all the options.”
– Peter Greenaway, Mrs. Talmann’s line in the movie The Draughtsman’s Contract, 1982
“Every time a draftsman lets himself be fascinated by the blind, every time he makes the blind a theme of his drawing, he projects, dreams, or hallucinates a figure of a draftsman […]. Or more precisely still, he begins to represent a drawing potency at work, the very act of drawing. He invents drawing.”
– Jacques Derrida, Memoires of the Blind: The Self-Portrait and Other Ruins, 1990
The empathic drill of blindness—the reflective exercise of unfolding seen images into their unseen cores and possibilities—historically has served as a refuge for reflecting on language, image, and time. Here, I do not refer to blindness as a biological state or a pathological diagnosis—though I mention in this text biographical examples of some giants whose fates crossed with it. Instead, blindness is presented as a poetic catalyst, a lyrical tool, and an expansion of denotative vision. (And when I mention the so-called “biologically blind,” I do so by believing that they saw, paradoxically, through this second hypothetical type of blindness.) To keep the eyes open and see nothing but the undefined, to shut the eyes and see everything.
Could the interruption of vision be a condition of visibility? Would this stoppage dissolve the consecrated cultural construct of mimetic representation, the semiotic potential of images finding its way other than the very narrow band of light radiation frequencies burnt on human retinas? The declination of the sight seems to enable other possibilities: the vision in the realm of the obscure, the exceeded, the metaphysical, the tactile, the minimum, the labyrinthian, the longed-for. In an ocularcentric culture, hyperfast optical micromovements jostle the lyrical pace and the fruition of the universe beyond layers of immediate visibility.
Jorge Luis Borges, the Argentine writer who tamed labyrinths, tigers, and libraries, lived blind through the last decades of his life. “That slow nightfall, that slow loss of sight, began when I began to see,” he wrote, prolonging his blindness until his own origin. Borges is one of many who presented blindness as a poetic catalyst, as aforementioned, as a possibility of perceiving the world beyond vision. Among the memories of certain colors that refused to stop inhabiting his mind and vaguely his eyes, Borges said that yellow remained faithful to him. It remained, of course, as a color, but as a present entity, visible even amidst blindness, which made itself known through memory, not through vision. The perception of things that are initially understood in the realm of visuality and become inhabitants only in the expansive terrains of memory is one of the centers of gravity of this exhibition. To see something through memory, through the cognitive mechanisms that form an infinite labyrinth, and not only through the eyes, the attentive receptacle of the soul.
Borges listed certain colors that accompanied him in the undefined world of blindness, again highlighting yellow and the confusion with white, which, being white, ironically and metachromatically, disappeared or merged with gray. This camouflage of gray evokes the tactile sensation of something mineral, as if the memory of color proposed other circuits of neurons and synapses, making one feel, if only for an instant, the touch of an irregular and cold stone, almost metallic, or grains of very dry sand slipping through one’s fingers and blending into sparkles of yellow, gray, and white. It resembles touching the sand of the desert, as Borges also did, mentioning that he moved the Sahara by shifting a handful of its sand. It is akin to seeing—or not seeing—the rough white landscapes of Armando Reverón, who constructed heaven and earth with the force of the sand grains illuminated by the blinding sun at the zenith near the equator.
In a few dozen paintings produced between 1959 and 1962, Tomie Ohtake was interested in the collapse of vision through the formation of blind spots in the anatomy of the human eye. They evoke, in a certain way, the confusion transmitted to the brain by the optic nerves when we close our eyes with great intention, when we look at a bright light for an extended period, or press our eyeballs under our eyelids for some time with a certain amount of pressure. Shadow and light amalgamate, and color and darkness intertwine. Things move in undefined gestures, bordering on the formless: we see, but we question whether these images are truly of the nature of the visible or if they are experiences of other magnitudes, partially apprehended by vision. For Ohtake, the experience of painting blindfolded is not merely a graphic endeavor; it is a conceptual operation that interrogates whether painting is possible beyond pictorial recollection, paradoxically constituting its body with evidence of blindness.
Borges said that his blindness began when he began to see until, at the age of 56, the moment came when he knew he had lost his vision—his vision as a reader and writer. The eyes of Alice Neel—who also read and wrote so many images through her paintings—are placidly closed in the portrait made by Robert Mapplethorpe. That moment of momentary and voluntary blindness, subtle as slowly blinking the eyes or closing them for a few seconds, generates, by not seeing anything, the sudden and ghostly appearance of all the images that those eyes have ever seen and created. The surrendered, relinquished eyes, in ecstasy.
The rhythmic graphite lines on paper drawn by Agnes Martin organize, in an infinite spatial desert, a completely blind mental and emotional space. The hand, therefore, follows as an extension of the mind, imagining (in the sense of “endowing with an image”) an inner universe that rejects the cognitive-cultural construction that horizontal lines marking a plane are suggestions of a landscape—whether toward its construction or its disappearance. The attempt to reconstruct an image through memory, or an idea from a mental image—analogous to the etymological intention of “image” that passes through the Latin “imago” to the Greek “eidos,” from which “idea” derives—seems to be pursued in Thiago Hattnher’s painting. In it, where the silhouette of a floral branch is almost a bygone memory, the superposition of chromatic fields composes a new image by suggesting the erasure of others, as in an inverse activity of prospecting, making it invisible by adding visible layers.
The ironic wonder surrounding the optical phenomenon itself, so complex yet so simple, leads Fernanda Gomes to create a painting of pure light: a cannon of square cut-out light is projected onto two canvases of raw linen with subtly different tones. The interplay of chromatic interactions by Josef Albers and the formal and geometric operations by Kazimir Malevich yield to the simplicity of the gesture, the linen bathed in light, and the light received by the linen. Such a straightforward operation seems so complete that it rejects any approximation: it resembles nothing else and lacks nothing. Blindness can therefore be total vision.
Prostrating herself on the worn steps of the sacred staircase, wrapped in a pitch-black cocoon, Solange Pessoa embodies the very essence of faith: the act of believing without seeing. She names her work—and, consequently, the protagonist in the video and herself—Cornelius: the first gentile converted to Christianity. She imagines (“becomes an image”) herself as one of the twelve stone prophets sculpted in the early 19th century who, despite being blind and having soapstone retinas, have observed the dawn and dusk on the winding mountains of Minas Gerais for centuries. They have witnessed countless other conversions and believe in the memory of images.
A whitish, flat object that floats, a sea of recognizable signs with varying degrees of translucence, through which one can see with a certain amount of negotiation. This labyrinth of letters—a threshold object in terms of visibility—Mira Schendel’s Graphic Object questions whether it is, ultimately, an obstacle to the vision of what lies behind it or a kind of lens through which one sees. Does the cacophony amplify or silence? Does it carry the weight of a storm of letters or the lightness of the mist that Brígida Baltar tries to capture with glass globes?
In this essay on blindness, twenty-one artists help us imagine what the images of this blind world might be like—or, as Roland Barthes put it in his analysis of photographs, the “blind field” created (or divined) when desire overflows depiction, activating memories and desires after being punctured by a sharp, personal impact of an image. This imaginary sight would then be the result of two seemingly opposite vectors: imagination as a phenomenon that forces its way out of the mind, while sight provides the path for various things to enter the mind. It is no coincidence, therefore, that blindness and mourning, or even mournful love, intersect: one loves what is no longer seen, even though it remains so present.
Text originally published at the exhibition On blindness at Nara Roesler, New York, on view from June 12 to August 9, 2025
