ABSTRACT
Paintings are not philosophical tracts. If they raise philosophical issues it is in an indirect way, through what they suggest, exemplify, draw attention to or induce people to reflect on. The question raised most saliently by this painting is that of the difference between painting and photography. To view a photograph knowing it is such is to feel in contact with what it pictures, even if that contact is interrupted or displaced in space and time. A photograph is always in some degree and at some level a trace of something real, something that exists or that existed at some time, and which one could have seen or might still see in the most straightforward and robust sense that the action of seeing can support. No Returns also rather prominently calls attention to the function of titles in works of art by the ambiguous yet quite suggestive title that it bears.
