Exhibition, or to be exposed
“The secret is on the skin (the secret and the sacred). Painting, drawing or photographing the nude always poses the same challenge: how to represent the unrepresentable fugacity of stripping bare, the instant modesty that comes to conceal revelation, and the indecency that comes to reveal the evasion.”
— Jean-Luc Nancy, Being Nude. The Skin of Images
There is a fine line between the body exposed by another’s gaze and the conscious, deliberate act of revealing one’s own nudity.
In Art Nouveau, women were often depicted as symbols of power, divinized and unreachable. Yet this exposure was typically mediated by male artists, with the model frequently an underprivileged woman. The low-angle perspective and poses of pride or delight conceal her lived reality, presenting instead an idealized projection — perhaps an auspicious image, even her aspiration, but not her truth.
In contrast, a naked body surprised by another’s gaze occupies a fragile, suspended moment of truth, before it decides to cover itself, or to deliberately expose their body by shaping their posture into an idealized one.
Ultimately, only intimacy grants access to the truth of the skin. It is the absence of exposure what allows the encounter. When the naked eye is blind to itself it grants its real revelation to the other.