Artist: Christopher Page
And does not enter me where I am who only shows it
Turning towards me you can find
On the wall of my gaze only your dreamt-of shadow.
I am that wretch comparable with mirrors
That can reflect but cannot see
Like them my eye is empty and, like them, inhabited
By your absence, which makes them blind.
— from ‘Contre-chant’ in Le Fou d’Elsa (1963) by Louis Aragon
Ben Hunter is delighted to present In vain your image comes to meet me, an exhibition of new paintings by Christopher Page. Across the gallery, Page’s canvases take the form of domestic mirrors—seemingly bevelled and framed—that do not return our reflection. Describing the play of light on cut glass and suggesting enigmatic interiors within, the works behave less like mirrors than screens: surfaces upon which desire is projected, and from which it returns, displaced.
The exhibition takes its title from the surrealist poet Louis Aragon’s Le Fou d’Elsa, later quoted by Jacques Lacan in The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis. Here the lover likens himself to a mirror—reflective but blind, inhabited only by the absence of the beloved. In the hands of Lacan, the poem exemplifies ‘the gaze’: an idea that signals not only that we are entangled in the visual, but that our desire distorts what we see. The world looks back at us, particularly where it withholds itself.
What, then, is at stake in looking? Are paintings mirrors, or are mirrors already paintings? Both, after all, promise—but withhold—space beyond their hard surfaces. And what becomes of us, the viewer, when the visual persists without us at its centre? Are we dismayed or relieved to find ourselves absent? What new possibilities emerge when our image fails to meet us? And beyond this, what happens when we realise that the image itself fails? These are after all not mirrors but painted illusions. Ultimately Page’s works, and his writings published alongside the exhibition, propose that a kind of truth—if a negative one—emerges when illusions fall apart.
