TaskCan we agree that the invisible is not a deficiency of the image, but its internal condition? That an image becomes meaningful not only through what it reveals to the gaze, but also through what eludes it?
Given- The contemporary image must not merely be visible. It must be instantly recognisable, reproducible, storable, and transmittable. It exists in a mode of perpetual circulation: it appears on a screen, becomes a photograph, is archived, copied, and disseminated further. In this system, to see often means to appropriate. The image must deliver itself entirely to the gaze, rendering itself available for fixation and subsequent use. Yet the accessibility of the image does not guarantee an encounter with what it shows. More often than not, we receive, in place of the world, its ready-made visual substitute.
- The contemporary artist Gleb Ivaniy creates paintings and graphic works in various shades of red, and then places them in red light. The light does not conceal the image the way fabric, a curtain, or a screen might; rather, it eliminates the differences between colours. The shades cease to be distinguishable from one another and coalesce into a single surface. In this way, invisibility arises not through concealment, but through extreme proximity. We see the material surface of the work, but we cannot discern the image that lies before us.
Required to proveAn image can exist without becoming fully accessible to the gaze.
Consequently, the invisibility of an image is not tantamount to its absence.
Therefore, to see does not mean to fully possess what has been seen.
Course of the solutionYou are reading this text in a space where the invisible does not hide behind the visible, as though a secret behind a veil. Look more closely. You see walls, works on the walls, their dimensions and materiality. Perhaps you notice other people around you. There is light here — plenty of light. And light, as we know, is one of the primary conditions of visibility. For in darkness, as is commonly held, nothing can be seen.
And yet there arises a sensation that something important remains inaccessible to your gaze. You continue to look, to peer into the works, but you cannot distinguish the images whose presence you know of, even though you are unable to verify it with your own eyes.
You know — or are compelled to believe — that an image exists on the surface of the work. Thus a rift opens between knowledge and vision. As if the sight you possess no longer belongs to you. As if you were rendered blind within full illumination. This state might be termed
a-visuality, which I interpret not as an absence of visual experience or a rejection of the visual, but as a situation in which vision persists yet loses its capacity to differentiate the image.
The red light, the surface, and the materiality of the work remain accessible to the gaze. What becomes inaccessible is merely the difference that would allow the image to manifest. We are therefore confronted not with an empty red surface, nor with an image merely hidden behind an external obstacle. Invisibility arises from within the visible itself — not from a lack of light, but from its excess.
The French philosopher Georges Didi-Huberman writes of the irremediable split between what we see and what, from what is seen, looks back at us. To see does not mean to fully possess what has been seen. Visual experience intensifies precisely at the moment when the gaze discovers its own limit and senses that something is escaping it.
In the works of Gleb Ivaniy, this split ceases to be an abstract philosophical formula and becomes an immediate spectator experience. We see the material surface of the work, but we cannot see the image that lies upon it. We find ourselves before an image whose presence does not coincide with its accessibility. The formula "close your eyes and look," which Didi-Huberman borrows from Joyce, points to a paradoxical possibility of vision: at times, sight becomes especially acute precisely in its collision with its own impossibility. We do not close our eyes, but we do encounter what we cannot see. We look and simultaneously lose that toward which our gaze is directed.
In this sense, the impossibility of seeing acquires not only an optical but also a political significance. The work falls outside the regime in which the image must be instantly recognised, fixed, reproduced, and transmitted further. It exists before us, but it does not fully transform into an accessible and circulating image. The work does not disappear. It merely ceases to deliver itself entirely to the gaze.
CorollaryThe work does not disappear when it ceases to be distinguishable. What disappears is merely the spectator’s privilege of considering the visible as fully available to them.
SolvedIlya Kronchev-Ivanov19 July 2026
Kostrovo, Moscow Region
BibliographyMarion, J.-L. The Crossing of the Visible. Moscow: Progress-Tradition, 2010.Didi-Huberman, G. What We See Looks Back at Us. Saint Petersburg: Nauka, 2001. 