Neutral Eye Movement

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The painter Symeon Sabbides, a citizen of a Middle Eastern state, adopted Western Orientalism—keywords: “Anatolian magic,” “mystery”—with a delay of over a century, effectively aligning himself with the exoticizing gaze of the West.

Initially the object of Orientalist perception, Greece became its agent after gaining independence—a shift exemplified in Sabbides’ painting Nude Dancer with Tambourine, which documents this transition from subject to purveyor.

 

I engage directly with this painting, using it to explore how the gaze is composed and functions. Sabbides’ image remains ambiguous: the possible exchange between viewer and figure is withheld, anticipating the male, desiring gaze. As noted anonymously in a Melissa Art Publishers commentary: “She becomes even more desirable by keeping her eyes closed.” The gaze intensifies when it is resisted.

I expand Sabbides’ two-dimensional image into a dialectical space: the lush, ornamental density of his linework resists immediate legibility and introduces a durational mode of viewing. The once free and desiring gaze now becomes entangled in visual excess—the Orient returns, this time not as content, but as a structure of overwhelming complexity.

This also grants a new, irrational logic to the sleeping woman in the image. My work exposes and deconstructs the voyeuristic gaze—a move fatal to desire. The gaze once constructed by Sabbides becomes illustrative.

The gaze becomes image.

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*Symeon Sabbides was a prominent 19th-century Greek artist whose work was deeply influenced by French Orientalism. From this movement, Greece began to shape its drive for liberation and a sense of national identity. However, this Western intellectual current quickly became entangled in stereotypes and condescending portrayals.
Yet Greece—partly through Sabbides—had long since shifted from being a passive subject of Orientalist views to actively appropriating them. In doing so, its original identity was redefined as 'the Other.'