25 November 2025
I see Parmigianino's Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror (1524) on the cover of John Ashbery's poetry collection of the same name every day—it's on a shelf in my studio. Revisiting that painting and the collection's titular poem (1974) today, as both feel relevant to a kind of visual simultaneity I am pursuing. Reflections in particular are becoming interesting, but not for stylistic reasons (I've photographed a lot of them for reference, but in the vast majority of them their visual warping is a trap). The kind I'm referring to are those that recontextualize and sharpen their environments from obscured vantages, subtly hinting at the ever-changing nature of space. A chunk of the aforementioned Ashbery poem could help here:
”...Francesco, your hand is big enough
To wreck the sphere, and too big,
One would think, to weave delicate meshes
That only argue its further detention.
(Big, but not coarse, merely on another scale,
Like a dozing whale on the sea bottom
In relation to the tiny, self-important ship
On the surface.) But your eyes proclaim
That everything is surface. The surface is what's there
And nothing can exist except what's there.
There are no recesses in the room, only alcoves,
And the window doesn't matter much, or that
Sliver of window or mirror on the right, even
As a gauge of the weather, which in French is
Le temps, the word for time, and which
Follows a course wherein changes are merely
Features of the whole. The whole is stable within
Instability, a globe like ours, resting
On a pedestal of vacuum, a ping-pong ball
Secure on its jet of water.
And just as there are no words for the surface, that is,
No words to say what it really is, that it is not
Superficial but a visible core, then there is
No way out of the problem of pathos vs. experience.
You will stay on, restive, serene in
Your gesture which is neither embrace nor warning
But which holds something of both in pure
Affirmation that doesn't affirm anything.”