Reviewing the unfinished portrait

The portrait exhibition has been praised for its honesty because the painter leaves patches of canvas bare. This is a curious compliment. A smooth surface can conceal a revision, but an exposed revision can advertise candour as efficiently as polish advertises mastery. The question is not whether we can see the brushwork, but what seeing it enables us to understand. In the portrait of the swimmer, one eye is finished and the other is a grey thumbprint. At first the incompletion feels intimate, as if we have entered before the sitter has arranged a public face. Looking longer, I become less certain. The painted eye is turned away; the unpainted one cannot return my inspection. The privilege of unfinishedness belongs to the viewer. This is not an argument for finishing the eye. A completed gaze might merely offer another comfortable fiction of reciprocity. It is an argument for noticing the terms of our comfort. The most valuable work in this exhibition does not allow us to call an encounter honest simply because we have been shown how the image was made.