WHEN THE BODY IS NOT PROOF

Presence, Non-Presence, and the Unreliable Image

par Tara Shakti
septembre 2026

One of antiquity’s most persistent stories about the beginning of image-making starts with a departure.

In Pliny the Elder’s Natural History, the daughter of the potter Butades traces the profile of a young man on a wall, following the shadow cast by a lamp before he leaves on a long journey.[1] The line is made while the body is still there, yet its purpose already belongs to absence. What she keeps is neither the man nor a likeness in the usual sense. She keeps the contour produced by his temporary obstruction of light.

I return to this story because it contains a problem that remains unresolved: what do we actually accept as evidence of presence?

Images make claims of this kind constantly. A portrait places a figure before us. A photograph appears to certify that someone once stood in front of a camera. A shadow tells us that a body interrupted light. Clothing retains the proportions for which it was cut. An imprint records contact after contact has ended. We are accustomed to reading such traces as evidence that someone is, or was, there.

But evidence is not the same thing as certainty, the body may be visible and still fail to tell us whether someone is present. That contradiction has become increasingly central to my painting.

Visibility Does Not Settle the Question

There is a temptation to treat visibility as resolution. Once a body has been shown, the image appears to have given us its answer: here is the figure; therefore here is the presence.

Painting can make that equation unstable.

Georges Didi-Huberman’s Confronting Images is useful precisely because it resists the assumption that an image is a stable arrangement of legible signs waiting to be correctly decoded. He describes an underside of visual representation where forms lose their apparent clarity and rational interpretation reaches its limits.[2] The point is not that images are unknowable. It is that seeing more does not necessarily close meaning.

For me, that distinction matters.

A face can be completely exposed and remain inaccessible. A body can occupy the centre of a canvas without clarifying the condition in which we encounter it. A silhouette may be immediately recognisable while withholding almost everything that would normally establish identity. Visibility can give us information and still deny us certainty.

This is part of what I am testing in Opacités, my current series of paintings. Young women emerge from dark grounds, often dressed in white. Their faces are present. Their bodies are present. Yet I do not want that physical visibility to function as an explanation.

The title matters here. Opacity is not emptiness, and it is not a lack of meaning. It is the possibility that something may remain visible without becoming fully available.

The Shadow Does Something Strange to Presence

A shadow seems, at first, to be straightforward evidence. Something must interrupt the light for a shadow to appear.

But the shadow gives us the body by removing nearly everything that individuates it. Skin, expression, texture, detail: all are compressed into shape. It confirms a physical obstruction while withholding the person.

This is why the story of Butades’ daughter still feels so contemporary. Her lover’s shadow says two things at once. He is here. He is about to be gone.

In painting, that contradiction can be intensified rather than solved. A figure and her shadow can carry equal visual weight. The shadow can become darker, sharper, more insistent than the body supposedly producing it. One figure might cast an unexpected second shadow. A figure can recede while the shadow remains.

At that point, the shadow is no longer simply a formal consequence of the body. It begins to compete with it as evidence.

Which one tells us that someone is there?

I am less interested in answering that question than in finding the exact point at which the viewer becomes aware that the question cannot be settled by looking harder.

What a Garment Knows About a Body

Clothing produces another kind of uncertainty.

An empty dress still contains instructions for a body. Sleeves anticipate arms. A neckline assumes a neck. Seams organise themselves around a torso. Even without a person inside it, a garment keeps a human architecture.

This interests me because the absence is not blank. The body has disappeared, but the space prepared for it remains.

Ana Mendieta’s Silueta works approach bodily absence by different means. In performances made from the 1970s onward, she inscribed or formed the outline of her body in natural environments and documented the resulting silhouettes and imprints. MoMA describes these traces as outlines that can suggest the body precisely through its absence.[3] The figure does not have to remain continuously visible in order to organise the image.

A garment can operate in a similarly unstable register without becoming a symbol with a fixed translation. Suspended, folded, inhabited, emptied: its relation to the body changes, but never disappears completely.

This is where I want to push Opacités further. Not by illustrating disappearance, but by reducing the amount of bodily information an image provides and observing what continues to register as presence.

A visible woman. A woman and her shadow. A garment without a woman. A shadow without an obvious body. A thread continuing beyond the place where a figure should have been.

The sequence is not a narrative of someone gradually dying or vanishing. It is a visual test. How much of the body can be removed before the viewer stops experiencing a presence?

The Image Is Not a Witness

The word “evidence” carries a useful tension because it suggests that an image might be asked to prove something.

Photography has often borne this burden more explicitly than painting. Painting, by contrast, has no necessary claim to having recorded a body that once stood before it. That freedom matters. It can construct a completely visible figure and still refuse to certify her status.

W. J. T. Mitchell has argued against treating pictures as inert containers whose meanings simply pass from maker to viewer. What Do Pictures Want? examines the powerful relations we establish with images and our tendency to behave as though pictures possess demands and agencies of their own.[4] Tina M. Campt, working from a very different position in Listening to Images, asks what becomes perceptible when we attend to photographs beyond the information immediately available to sight.[5]

Both are useful to me because they move the discussion away from the idea that an image’s work ends once its visible content has been identified.

A woman.
A dress.
A shadow.
A thread.

Naming them does not exhaust what they are doing.

In Opacités, these elements are not clues leading toward a concealed correct answer. I am not asking the viewer to solve whether a figure is living or non-living, present or non-present. I am interested in the instability of those categories themselves.

“Non-living” is a term I use deliberately. It marks the end of biological life without automatically declaring absence. “Absent” makes a different claim: it describes a relation between someone, somewhere, and those who remain.

The two conditions can coincide, but they do not have to.

That distinction changes what a painting is allowed to do. If living/non-living and present/non-present are not identical oppositions, then the visible body cannot be used as a simple answer key. A painted figure may be entirely there as an image while remaining unresolved as a presence.

Unreliable Evidence

I have started to think of this as unreliable evidence.

Not false evidence. Not deception.

Unreliable because the image exposes the assumptions through which we decide that presence has been proven.

We trust bodies. We trust shadows when bodies disappear. We trust clothing because it remembers proportions. We trust traces because something must have made them. Yet each of these forms of evidence can be separated from the presence we use it to establish.

The question then becomes less What does this image represent? than What makes me believe that someone is here?

That change is small, but it alters the entire encounter.

It also returns me to the wall in Pliny’s story. The young woman cannot keep the departing body. She keeps a line made from its shadow. The line does not restore the person, and it does not erase the departure. It holds a relation to both.

Perhaps that is what makes the story endure.

The traced line does not conquer absence. It gives absence a contour.

For my own work, the problem now begins there. I want to know how far a painted body can recede before presence recedes with it; whether a shadow can become more persuasive than a figure; whether clothing can retain a body without representing one; and whether the viewer can remain before an image whose central condition is never fully resolved.

The body may be visible.

That does not mean the image has told us who or what is present.

References

[1] Pliny the Elder, Natural History, Book XXXV, chapter 43 (35.151), account of Butades and his daughter; English translation available through the Perseus Digital Library.

[2] Georges Didi-Huberman, Confronting Images: Questioning the Ends of a Certain History of Art, trans. John Goodman, Penn State University Press.

[3] Museum of Modern Art, “Ana Mendieta,” collection text on the Silueta series (1973–80), including the artist’s use of imprints and silhouettes of the absent body.

[4] W. J. T. Mitchell, What Do Pictures Want? The Lives and Loves of Images, University of Chicago Press, 2005.

[5] Tina M. Campt, Listening to Images, Duke University Press, 2017.