Susanne Themlitz (1968)
Untitled, 2000

Susanne Themlitz (1968)
Untitled, 2000.
Drawing from the series “Solitários Inofensivos” #10
Carbon on paper Inv. 01 DP1780

Someone with a physical flaw that is goodhearted. Our instincts tend to dictate this as somewhat unlikely. For in cinema and popular tale, the good are pretty, even if this confirmation only comes in the end. As children, we were taught to avoid those who frighten us or seem suspicious. Who can avoid deciding immediately after seeing a face if it is kind, fearsome or something else?

In the case of this drawing by Susanne Themlitz, the uncanny derives from unlikelihood. Our codes and instincts used in deciphering fail. The duality that defines this face at several levels attracts and averts. This could be a runaway or a stalker. These are the first two instances of opposites: the first is that, once we fall prey to this gaze, we remain, despite the urge to leave; the second being that the character seems to be at once frightened and driven to fright.

The next duality is a formal effect that serves the prior: the face seems to have an invisible dividing line: the right eye is cunning, domineering, angry, suspicious; the left one, deep, afraid, pleading. The one eyebrow is underscored so that the other appears creased. This disproportion compresses the wrinkled forehead’s tension, the flawed nose and grimace of a closed mouth and openness of a teasing smile and borderline despair. Where is the middle?

This synthesis is a mixture of impressions that also provides the sense of facing a prisoner in a dark cell as light suddenly floodens the room, a patient who laughs and suffers, an apparition from a fable, a passing ghost, a nightmarish vision; the impression of experiencing night and day on the black background and this evenly lit figure; the feeling of someone who hesitates between speech and hearing.

But he has no ears or hair to frame his face; his arms disappear behind his back. The top button to his shirt is open. An enormous face surges from a skinny body, looking down: the cranium of a madman or outlaw; a mutant being that defends himself with antipathy, an impostor, an “innocent loner” who tries to get used to his flaws; who breathes nervous agitation; whose eyes follow ones every move.

The fiction of this face, based on the artist’s own (like in almost all of her work), opens itself to yet another mythical terrain with an important synthesis of opposites; androgyny.  Emptiness and plenitude, dusk and dawn, origin and destiny come to fruition; androgyny annihilates seeing and being seen.

What one regards is the act of being regarded. We see author and character, character and observer, observer and author, female and male, reality and fiction. The observer no longer retains opposites but recovers their memory with the fear and excitement that comes with renewal.

Leonor Nazaré