Painting and ethics

The Relationship Of Painting And ethics is at once oblique and obvious. If, as Emmanuel Levinas claims, ethics arises from the “epiphany of the face,” the obvious fact is that we all have faces and have faced others. Gerhard Richter’s painting Betty shows the shoulders and head of a blond-haired girl from the back, turned away from us and the face of the painting. ¹ How peculiar it is to show someone from behind, to make a portrait that is revealed in the back of the head and in the turning away. Perhaps as Levinas suggests, it is in the nape of the neck that one is lured to see the under of the face-to-face or to find the other in truth. ² It is a meeting place that bears its face from behind as an obscured view. The nape is literally the back of the neck, but it is the back that is the front we wish the face to be. The nape provokes an erotics that loosely composes a turning of thought around a spot that is a meeting of its subject. In this way Betty is really a turning toward an ethics, which is painting.