Psyche between two worlds

There are moments when seeing more does not mean understanding better.

I am interested in that contradiction. We live trying to illuminate everything, as if seeing more necessarily meant understanding more.

Perhaps that is why the face dissolves into the paint. The body appears, but the identity never fully does.

The figure seems to exist between two places.

I do not know whether she is ascending, awakening, or simply leaving behind something that can no longer follow her.

That is what drew me most to the myth of Psyche. Her need to look, to know what lay behind what she could not see. And how some answers, rather than bringing clarity, change the way we see forever.

Psyche can no longer go back. She must undergo a series of trials and even descend into the underworld. This is where the myth becomes most interesting to me. It is no longer about discovering who Eros is. It is about discovering who she is after having looked.

Her own name contains something of this idea. Psychē can mean soul, breath, or vital principle. It is the origin of our word psyche.

I did not want to represent Psyche literally or fill the image with symbols explaining the myth. There are no wings, Eros does not appear, and we do not see the lamp.

The figure simply remains suspended between two spaces. We cannot quite tell whether she is ascending, awakening, or whether she still carries something of the descent within her.

Her face almost disappears. I am interested in our inability to fully identify her, because perhaps transformation also has something to do with that. With accepting that, after certain experiences, we do not return to exactly the same form we had before.

At the end of the myth, Psyche returns from the underworld, falls into a deathlike sleep, and awakens again. She is then granted immortality. But the woman who ascends is no longer the same woman who lit that lamp to look upon the one she loved.

Psyche means soul, but her story also speaks about the need to look. To illuminate what we do not understand, even knowing that what we discover may break the image we once held.

I like to think of the painting from that place. Not as a fall or a completed ascent, but as the moment in between. When something has already been lost, but what comes next has not yet taken shape.

Perhaps the soul is something like that. Not a fixed identity waiting to be found and defined, but something that remains while we continue to change.

There are things we can only understand once we have lived through them.