An Exploration into Our Connection with the Divine and Ourselves

BY ANGELA CLARKE

Has our society ceased to honour the importance of the lingering look as a means to forge human connection? The exhibition at the Italian Cultural Centre Gallery (Il Museo) examines this concept, drawing attention to the visual gaze from the perspective of ancient art history.

The exhibition focuses on the tradition of portraits from Egypt, as well as the Christian and Byzantine icons, which have been influenced by them. The Fayum portraits originally painted between the 3rd century BC to the 3rd century AD unearth the deep power of the human eye to form connections with the spirits of the present, the past and future.

This exhibition features the work of four artists who are contemporary interpreters of these ancient traditions: Joy Hanser, Trish Graham, Alina Smolyansky and David Walker. The first two artists have reconstructed the ancient death portraits from the Egyptian Fayum Basin; the last two have taken the painstaking and ritualistic training which icon painting demands.

These ancient societies are fundamental to our understanding of the human gaze in art history. Long before our days of social media and handheld gadgets, the silence and impact behind the human gaze was one of the most meaningful modes of human connection. In the ancient world and into the early Christian one the gaze embodied not just human connection but a bridge to the nether world and even to divinity.

Even as late as early modern Italy up to the 1700s, the human gaze was considered so potent that it had the power to inspire, destabilize and even speak volumes about the moral character of a person. The gaze offered a massive message to society without even uttering a word.

As the artists in this exhibition reveal, it is only by going back into the annals of art history that we will be able to reacquaint ourselves with the power of the human gaze, long before social media and the computer screen dimmed its impact.

The series painted by Joy Hanser is inspired by 900 Egyptian Fayum portraits discovered in the 19th century. These exquisitely painted panels feature the faces of men and women who lived in the area of Egypt called the Fayum Basin; just 62 miles away from Cairo.

Egypt during this period was directly under the Roman Empire. It was here that a cultural hybrid existed where the Greco-Roman world and Egyptian cultures cross-pollinated, co-existed and gave rise to this beautiful artistic work, which reveal a society grappling to maintain a connection with loved ones after death.

The figures depicted on the paintings were Egyptian by birth, but their aesthetic sensibilities were Greco-Roman. This hybridity extended to their beliefs about the afterlife that was a perfect melding of ancient Egyptian embalming rituals mixed with ancient Roman ancestor worship.

This deep belief in the afterlife is conveyed through the eyes. The eyes contained the soul and that soul continued to resonate long after death.

It is this gaze that became the formative influence over religious icons of the Christian world. The most important feature in religious icons were the large eyes that also represented the deep connection between divinity and humans.

In this exhibition, the egg tempera painter Alina Smolyansky interprets these spiritual images. In essence, in icons, the eyes became so meaningful that all other human features were dwarfed in comparison.

These traditions of spiritual portrait paintings reveal that whether, it is a connection with ourselves, each other, a bridge across time, other worlds, the deity or deities; the gaze has always been a meaningful way to signal connection and inspiration and one we have sadly lost with our dependance on the computer screen.

Please join this exhibition where we explore the lost art of the human gaze. The exhibition opens at the Italian Cultural Centre Gallery (Il Museo) on November 9 and runs until January 7, 2024.

^{Angela Clarke is the gallery director and curator at Il Museo located at Italian Cultural Centre on 3075 Slocan Street and Grandview Highway.}

^{Copyright Renfrew-Collingwood Community News}