Page 14 - Art First: Partou Zia: Portraits Beyond Self

what kind of self does it portray? It is not narcissistic, as neither of the
figures looks at the other, or indeed at us as viewer, or again at Partou
as painter. She is not examining a self constituted through the gaze,
or the scopic field (in the language of today’s media theory). What she
has articulated escapes the structures posited in dominant theories
because it is about touch. What matters about these figures is that they
know each other through their bodies.

In Fenced Horizons (2005), cat. no. 7, and in Shadow Writing (200?), cat.
no. 8, the figures are equally intimately joined. But here Partou explores
not only the consciousness of a single person, but also that of partners.

To read or write in shared space is to enter an augmented space, beyond
even a dream-scape; in the former, the reader−fingers tense with concen-
tration−is seemingly joined at the neck to her partner, while the radio
is whimsically plugged into the sky as if it were Prospero’s; in the latter, the
rhythm of the intensely focused heads leads almost inevitably to the curve
of the road they conjure.

But in neither case is the place inhabited by the figures clearly separated
from the landscape. In Fenced Horizons the bed dissolves into the blue-
green of the swirling space that is not-quite-bounded by the fence;
in Shadow Writing the blue behind the heads continues right across the
painting, and the light space beside the road is like another page folded
out from the book.

cat no. 7 Fenced Horizons, 2005, oil on canvas, 150 x 170 cm