Seeing Double
The Back Wall

“Everything we see hides another thing, we always want to see what is hidden by what we see.” - Rene Magritte

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Drawing from Louis Daguerre’s diorama and René Magritte's Not To Be Reproduced, The Back Wall treats the image as spatially contingent and durational, staging the misalignment between image and referent that remains unresolved as a condition of seeing.

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The project begins from a photographic translation of a painting, where reproduction introduces loss and displacement that is extended spatially through the work. The photo engages a mirror composition - on one side, a translated mystery; on the other, deep space. The back wall is conceptualized no longer as a surface, but a corridor - an extended threshold holding the tension between the photographic image and the absent painting.

 

Through a designed dual gaze at opposite ends of the corridor, the flattened camera image fractures into geometric layers. Objects and scenes from the painting - orthographically projected onto the backside - are encountered sequentially as one moves through the space. Seeing becomes durational, and the image is reconstructed not from a single viewpoint but across time, displacement, and partial encounter.