False Doors and Fake Windows

False Doors and Fake Windows

Straight to the conclusion: False doors are magical, or at least allude to magic. They promise nothing specific and are not actual doors. Because they are false doors they lead to nowhere because you cannot pass through them, at least not bodily. I like and appreciate false doors, trompe l’oeil or in any other form. Because they lead nowhere, they also lead anywhere your mind can take you through them. I especially like the false doors carved into tomb walls, in pyramids and elsewhere. Do not confuse false doors with hidden or secret doors. Those doors may be passed through and while they may lead to wonderlands, they are not of my particular concern. I limit myself to doors you cannot get to the other side of and windows that are only an illusion of something beyond.

Never have I enjoyed fake windows.

A window is a hole through a wall that permits a view of what is on the other side of that wall. One does not crawl through a window to the other side. Usually the perimeter of the window is defined by an architectural detail, generally referred to as a window frame. Real windows serve many purposes, not least of their value is daylight illumination of an interior space. Real windows are good things. Fake windows annoy me. They do not invite natural light into a space, nor do they show us what the weather is like outside.

When in Rome, many years ago, I explored the Domus Area. I was hopeful of discovering interior spaces devoid of natural light with walls decorated in geometric motifs, or at least if representational, floor to ceiling depictions of forests or beasts or mythical events. Perhaps the ceiling would be covered in stars, constellations pulled together to identify the Great Bear and Orion or such celestial marvels. But, no. What I saw instead disappointed me. On the interior walls were painted small landscapes within painted rectangular window frames.

I thought of pizza parlors with bad murals: landscapes intended to transport the diner to a faraway place. Perhaps to a better pizza parlor. I also thought how the convention of the window frame on the restaurant’s illusionistic landscape is a carryover of that convention of punching a hole through the wall into a make-believe-land. I do not like fake windows, which is not a comment upon Claude de Lorain or John Constable. It is a comment upon the fact that a window frame separates the viewer inside of a home from the landscape or cityscape outside, usually for good reason. The weather inside may be better than that outside. A framed picture has its reasons to be framed, but primarily those are ancient conventions. Frames are like fences or moats.

A picture frame makes a class statement of value, even without heavy gold moulding. It also says, “hands off”. But mostly, it implies that there is a separation between the viewer and the viewed. A fake window is not a view of the world beyond the solid wall.

My large scale paintings are unframed and unstretched because I would rather invite the viewer to get up really close, to look for an invisible door handle by which they might enter the painting.

Knock on them as if they might be false doors.