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Two profiles, a man and a woman. Their eyes are wells of darkness, the mouths are no longer there.
A lifeless landscape in the background, a house that looks abandoned, a tree dividing the canvas in two, like a deep wound.
"Eyes into Eyes" is a little-known work by the Norwegian master. When I stood before it, at a beautiful exhibition in Lugano, it took my breath away, leaving me paralyzed, bewildered, with a grimace of fear on my face. In front of this painting, I felt colder than I ever have in my entire life.
Munch, poet of the abyss, here evokes the worst nightmare of every couple, the terminal illness of love: the void. The title, fierce, speaks of eyes, but these eyes belong to two corpses.
There are no longer words nor glances between the man and the woman depicted on the canvas (I almost said "in the canvas", as if they were sullen inhabitants of it).
The faces are dissolved, waxy, erased.
There's nothing left that unites, nothing that divides, simply nothing.
It is something more than indifference: it is darkness.
This painting frightens me immensely because it tells of the horrible possibility lurking beyond the threshold of kisses, plans, caresses. A Gorgon capable of turning us to stone, crouched among these lifeless colors that emit vapors of rotting sentiments.
Those who love fear more than anything the absence, the nothingness in the eyes of the dearest person, that empty gaze that recalls distant funeral bells. The horrid spiral of habit that replaces laughter and tender games between lovers and transforms them into clichés, routines of dull days overtaken by the everyday. Lives of wax.
"Eyes into Eyes" profoundly captures this dark terror and strikes with the force of a fragmentation bomb all the clichés about eternal love.
In the face of this apotheosis of incommunicability, we can only look elsewhere, repeating to ourselves like a prayer "for me it’s different, we are different, for me it’s different, we are different".
Repeat it a hundred, a thousand times, and hope with all your heart that it’s true.
Edvard Munch - Eyes into Eyes
1894, Oil on canvas
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