Second-Class Salon, with airline seats. A room in transit is what we see in Edward Hopper's painting. The room/carriage is perforated, light attacks it from the windows, right and left. The floor is stained, interior sunlight has taken over the floor. (Stained rooms trade back and forth in Hopper's work).
At the end of his life, interior sunlight became Hopper's favorite spectacle. (His little figures bask in their homes). What role does the closed hidden door play? Does it hide the captain? Does it reveal an entrance to danger? Uncontrolled nowhere? The passengers may be alone, they found themselves surrounded only by light.
Both ladies have appeared in other paintings, where they have been professional spectators - they paid for a ticket to see. Here, one has exchanged light for a good book. The empty seats are not vacant, they are ours. The artist is convinced that the work bearing his signature is entirely his own, and there, above, he confronts the viewer.
Every time the viewer's eyes get hooked into the artwork - getting hooked means two things at once: dropping anchor and being caught on the hook. Therefore, every time the viewer's eyes get hooked into the artwork, the artwork awakens the viewer's senses and mind. And he begins to give birth to words...
But how safe a currency are words? Can we rely on them without collapsing with them? Language has become a rag for Heidegger, a mass medium of transport, stray, that we use randomly, indifferently, and mechanically - somewhat like a tram. Words stupefy, for Nietzsche, they make the unprecedented commonplace.
Once in the "Symposium" and twice in the "Sophist," Plato returns to the definition of poetry, that is, creation, as a transition from non-being to being, from nonexistence to existence. But what can it mean that art originates from nothing? Ex nihilo nihil fit, the Latins used to say. From nothing, nothing is born - does the artwork exist?
Van Gogh writes to his brother Theo: "One must have died many times to paint like this."
