A função do olhar na captura da obra de arte: aproximações entre Merleau-Ponty e Lacan

Abstract

This dissertation proposes to investigate the role of the gaze in capturing the work of art, supported by the philosophical premises of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and the psychoanalytic elaborations of Jacques Lacan. With the link between the three areas of knowledge: philosophy, art and psychoanalysis, it is intended to promote a rapprochement between the authors in question, since they maintained a fruitful dialogue interrupted at the time, by the premature death of Merleau-Ponty. Furthermore, both addressed the dependence of the visible in relation to what puts us under the seeing eye, bringing fascination into play. Thus, both the artist and the spectator/contemplator can be captured by the gaze, and therefore, as a function of the gaze, the thesis is defended that it is at the service of diverting the subject from the void that constitutes him, acting as a decoy to castration. To this end, this study is based on a bibliographical review of theorists, and on the author's reflections supported by the works of painters Paul Cézanne and Claude Monet, as well as some biographical data that corroborate their relationship with painting, as well as some photographs that go beyond the illustrative value, but complement the text. During the dissertation, it is evident that the artistic work of these painters, even belonging to different movements, has as its axis the function of the gaze as a “beautiful decoy”, so that in the scopic field, the object can take over a substance as evanescent as light, to present itself to the subject of desire, like looking. In this way, whether in Cézanne's or Monet's artistic work, the function of the gaze is in the sense of covering up castration, that is, it concerns what distracts and cheats the subject about desire, in order to keep away from consequence of the articulation between creation and the death drive. This can be attested to Monet's relentless attempt to capture light with its glare and reflections, or Cezanne's need to portray the scene as his eyes saw it in order to crystallize it. This concludes with the observation that the function of the gaze brings into play the fascination of the artist, but also of the spectator/contemplator, and both can be diverted from the constitutive emptiness of castration with the illusion of completeness, as a function of the gaze in capture of the artwork.