The look that makes shaving in Modigliani ́s painting

Abstract

This paper approaches the matter of look in the fields of psychoanalysis and art, starting from the effects produced by the work of the Italian painter Amedeo Modigliani. Seeking meaning for the socket ́s representation in the eye, present in the artist's paintings, it makes reflections about the image in the question to its relation with the subject. Through the interdiction of image, this work underlines the importance of these creations that imply another way of accessing the imagination, highlighting its function of cut, a function of ripeness that makes the experience of the reverse emerge. By undressing the image of the veil that covers it, the distressing anguish that breaks out in this act of imagery contemplation, it brings the dimension of horror proposed by Freud (1919), revealing the nakedness of the look. Something of death shears the image, in the direction of what Barthes (1980) develops by situating the notion of punctum in photographs. Lastly, the reflection over the mortuary mask of Modigliani points to the possibility of insertion of the image into death, in reverse of what the artist paints in his images in which something of death emerges, marking them, thereby bringing about the limits of the image on its threshold with the real.