The Crucifixion as seen through the eyes of Christ

English – Español

From the Other Side

It happened one night in southern Spain in 1980.

A group of artists had gathered for a party in an abandoned power station beside the river. The building was half ruined and had been without electricity for years. We sat around the fireplace, drinking and talking by candlelight.

On the mantelpiece stood an empty green Mateus rosé bottle. A candle had been placed beside it. The flame passed through the green glass and projected a trembling field of light and shadow onto the wall behind.

At some point during the evening I found myself staring at it.

Gradually—or perhaps suddenly; after all these years I no longer know—the flickering forms became a scene. What I saw was the Crucifixion at Golgotha.

But there was something profoundly strange about it.

I was not looking at Christ on the cross.

I was looking from the cross.

The distinction may seem small, but it changed everything. The Crucifixion is among the most frequently represented subjects in Western art. For centuries the fundamental relationship has remained remarkably constant: Christ is there, and we are here. We look towards him—from below the cross, from among the mourners, from somewhere within the landscape.

In what appeared on that wall, the relationship had been reversed.

Christ was nowhere to be seen because the scene was being experienced from where he would have been. I seemed to be looking through his eyes.

I found the experience disturbing and could not forget it.

I had a studio in Nerja at the time, although even the studio had a slightly improbable history. An elderly English gentleman had rented a house in Calle Puerta del Mar, just beside the Balcón de Europa. He normally lived in an old mill above Frigiliana and occupied only one room of the Nerja house, where he kept a telephone. He was a former MI6 agent. The rest of the house he left to me, and it became my studio.

It was there that I began trying to paint what I had seen. The resulting work was very large and almost entirely abstract. Looking at photographs of it today, I see less a representation of Golgotha than an attempt to paint a damaged field of vision: bloodshot, unstable, flickering, perhaps belonging to someone drifting in and out of consciousness. Forms appear and disappear. Somewhere within them, the other crosses can just be made out.

That matters to me now.

A conventional painting could have shown what someone standing on the cross might have seen. But that was not quite the experience. What I was trying to paint was what seeing itself might become under those conditions.

There is an important historical precedent. Around 1890, James Tissot painted What Our Lord Saw from the Cross, placing the viewer in Christ’s position and showing the people gathered below. I did not know the work at the time. Tissot’s painting, however, remains a coherent representation of the visible scene. What concerned me was something less stable: not simply a change of physical viewpoint, but a change in the condition of perception itself.

Then I did something rather drastic.

I cut the painting into 152 pieces.

Each fragment became a small independent work, mounted and numbered. They were sent or given to people in different parts of the world. I thought of the gesture rather irreverently and seriously at the same time: the painting would be distributed like sacramental bread.

One piece was sent to Pope John Paul II.

Another was sent to New York. Rather misguidedly, I sent it to the Metropolitan Museum of Art rather than the Museum of Modern Art. On 18 January 1983, a letter came back from the Met. They thanked me for submitting the work but explained that it did not fall within the focus of their collection. The fragment was returned.

And then the pieces disappeared into people’s lives.

I had no idea what became of most of them.

Decades passed.

Every now and then, however, something remarkable happened. Someone would contact me because they possessed one of the fragments. Photographs began to arrive: number 29, number 78, and others. Small pieces of a painting I had cut apart more than forty years earlier were suddenly appearing again.

Some had travelled through families. Some had crossed countries. In certain cases I knew almost nothing about the route by which they had reached their present owners.

Seen individually, they no longer resemble fragments of a conventional image. Each has developed an existence of its own. A sweep of ochre, a piece of blue, exposed canvas, thick ridges of white or red paint. Yet when one knows where they came from, each contains a physical piece of that original field.

There is something about this that I could not have understood when I cut the painting apart in 1980.

The original experience had already involved a reversal of perspective. Instead of looking at the central figure, the viewpoint moved into him. The person normally represented became the position from which the world was seen.

Then the painting underwent another reversal.

A single field of vision was divided into 152 fragments and dispersed among 152 possible lives.

One viewpoint became many.

Perhaps nothing more needs to be made of it. An empty wine bottle, a candle, a ruined power station, a party late at night. Light striking a wall and a mind finding something extraordinary within it.

Then a painting.

Then 152 pieces.

And now, forty-six years later, some of those pieces are slowly finding their way back into sight.

I find that last fact almost as strange as the night on which the story began.