A recurring motif in twentieth century visual art is the domestic interior, a subcategory of which is the 'empty room'. Take, for example, these three rooms:—What’s the significance of emptiness here? More specifically, what is the actual subject matter that lends them their unsettling quality? Is it in the material objects that describe a condition of inhabitation, or rather the
space that surrounds such objects? What about the walls, floor and ceiling planes which circumscribe the spatial volumes, while implicating the viewer through a careful manipulation of perspective?
It seems to me the emotional power of these images lies in the fact that they do not have a subject matter per se, but instead succeed at evoking something—an atmosphere, a latent presence, if you like—that escapes pictorial description altogether. Here emptiness, that is, negative space, is assigned a positive value, which creates in effect a moment of tension between what one expects to see (an object) and what one is confronted with (a non-object). This trick of inversion is what gives rise to that curious sense of surreality and ‘presence of an absence’.
Not so much representations of physical places as metaphors of the mind, the rooms further suggest a sort of
topography of the unconscious, where interior spaces such as rooms, closets and corridors describe an analogous landscape of private memories, thoughts and desires. As in those dreams of wandering one’s childhood home, the experience is that of feeling both foreign and familiar at the same time.
A similar line of thinking can be found in the Gaston Bachelard’s
The Poetics of Space, who in his introduction quotes Carl Jung:
“We have to describe and to explain a building the upper story of which was erected in the nineteenth century; the ground-floor dates from the sixteenth century, and a careful examination of the masonry discloses the fact that it was reconstructed from a dwelling-tower of the eleventh century. In the cellar we discover Roman foundation walls, and under the cellar a filled-in cave, in the floor of which stone tools are found and remnants of glacial fauna in the layers below. That would be a sort of picture of our mental structure.”
Image Source:
1. Edward Hopper, “Rooms by the Sea, 1951,” in Gail Levin,
Edward Hopper: the art and the artist. (New York: Norton, 1980), 295.
2. Vilhelm Hammershoi, “The Artist's House, 1915” in Anne-Birgitte Fonsmark,
Vilhelm Hammershoi, 1864-1916: Danish Painter of Solitude and Light. (New York: Guggenheim Museum, 1998).
3. Antonio Lopez Garcia, “House of Antonio Lopez Torres, 1972-75.”
http://www.timlowly.com/a/lopezgarcia.htmlWork Cited:
Bachelard, Gaston.
The Poetics of Space. Boston: Beacon Press, 1969. xxxiv.
