In My Eye

IN MY EYE: THE ANATOMY OF GAZE.

What does it mean to look? While the biological sensation of seeing through our eyes is a commonplace, the experience goes far deeper. Through our eyes, we do not merely register the world; we actively inhabit it. We are flâneurs, noticing, experiencing, living. In my Eye begins exactly here. Before an artwork, the viewer assumes a critical stance; observing, perceiving, and reflecting. They enter into dialogue with the visual through the gaze, connect with it, and ultimately search for a fragment of themselves within it.

The first layer of viewing begins with what catches the eye. Before meaning, before form, there is colour: intense, vivid, immediate. It arrests the gaze, drawing it toward what matters, illuminating the essential. Colour does not merely decorate; it directs. It acts as a silent guide, orienting the viewer through the work and toward the message within. Yet the gaze does not rest with colour alone. Instinctively, it seeks the familiar; and nothing is more familiar than the human face. Rendered through a semi-realistic lens, these portraits hold the eye in a different way, not through intensity, but through recognition. This becomes the common ground of the exhibiting artists: the face as primary tool, the human presence as first language, while each artist interprets the portrait in their own manner. While the vibrant, atmospheric colour of Ventura, Pišpek, and Hüppi first captures the eye, the gaze ultimately settles where it always does; on the human face. It is here that Böhnisch’s portraits and Cremers’ raw, penetrating eyes hold us, not through spectacle, but through an intimacy we cannot look away from.

Yet recognition is only the threshold. The longer we look, the more the gaze becomes an act. Moving across the face of the Other, it begins to read: decoding eyes, expression, presence, as though they were a system of signs. The face becomes a map; the gaze, the instrument that attempts to navigate it. Yet this exchange is never one-directional. In Buetti’s work, the gaze returns, sharp, ironic, unsettling, reversing the dynamic and implicating the viewer in what they believed they were simply observing. Neeb extends this further, making visible the moment in which we recognize that we are seen as much as we see. This is mirroring as exchange: through the eyes of the Other, we locate ourselves. Alterity becomes not a distance to observe, but a surface in which our own position is quietly revealed.

Looking into something familiar calls us to seek for parts of our identity into those portraits. We opt to like something that we can relate with and match with our identity, who we are. Here the eyes function as a tool of self-knowledge. The artists here turn the gaze inward: Valeria Patrizi and Mariana Ignataki use the portrait not as a mirror of appearance, but as a surface for introspection. Through their work, the eyes cease to be a feature and become a threshold, the point at which looking transforms into knowing. Here, vision becomes a tool of self-knowledge; and the question shifts quietly from what do I see to who am I.

Ultimately, to look is merely the first step; the true destination is perception. As the journey of In My Eye draws to a close, we understand that an artwork is never truly finished on the canvas. Perception is not passive reception, it is an active, intimate act of creation; a synthesis of external stimulus, the gaze of the Other, and our own identity. The final image does not exist on the gallery walls. It is constructed, wholly and uniquely, within the eye of the viewer. Everything we see is filtered through who we are. In the end, the true exhibition takes place nowhere else but in that deeply personal, irreducible space: In My Eye.