ABSTRACT
During the early 1990s, Yitzhak Livneh painted a series of paintings depicting mirrors which do not reflect. The paintings were based on auction-house catalogs exhibiting photographs of old murky mirrors. Interpreters and critics of Livneh's paintings produced over the last three decades agree that his art variously engages the theme of death. In the seminar on the object of psychoanalysis, Lacan reiterates that the structure of the phantasm is analogous to the structure of a figurative painting. The subject's position in the phantasm is structurally parallel to his position in front of a painting as articulated in terms of Alberti's geometrical perspective. Lacan's discussion of the split between the eye and the gaze in the seminar on the few fundamental concepts of psychoanalysis clarifies the visual structure of the phantasm. A more fundamental, and more troubling, relation of specularity and death has to do with the limits of vision and their transgression.
