Painting as Scotomization: The Rhetoric of a Concealed Image

In Back of a Painting: History Painting No. 12, Doom of 1998–2004, Israeli artist David Ginton paints a back side of a painting with an inscription that describes the painting's alleged recto. The text alludes to a verse from the book of Micah, which unfolds the story of an apprentice who banishes his master. In Ginton's rewriting, the story is displaced to current Israeli politics, yet the charged and disturbing visual content remains hidden, as though painted on the reversed side. Ginton's painting serves for examining a painterly characteristic, in which paintings engage with what cannot be shown directly – endowing this occlusion a significant role. I suggest exploring this characteristic through two texts by Jacques Derrida: Memoire of the Blind of 1993, and his treatise on Valerio Adami's drawing of a back side of a painting in his book The Truth in Painting. A close reading of Derrida's two texts will serve to anchor Ginton's painting in a wider context. As will be shown, Derrida's texts could be read like Ginton's painting, as an exploration of the avoidance of looking and its political consequences. In order to explicate this ambiguous visuality, I turn in what follows to Freud's and Lacan's conceptualizations of the term scotomization regarding the visual field.