Paintings address us, and they do so in part through creating uncertainty; our engagement with them involves a continuous adjustment as we scan them for suggestions on how to proceed and for confirmation or disconfirmation of our responses. At the core of depiction is the recognition of its subject, and this remains so even when the subject is radically transformed and recognition becomes correspondingly extended; it remains so not because we seek the subject matter despite the complications of painting but because recognition and complication are each furthered by the other. The conditions out of which paintings emerge reappear more or less interwoven in their content; we seek out the procedures of painting in the subject and not only the subject in the procedures.
Michael Podro, Depiction (Yale University Press, 1998).
