There comes a moment when a work is no longer simply looked at.
The gaze slows, hesitates, then finds itself displaced. The body, too: it moves closer, steps aside, returns, searches for the right distance.
In return, something is at work, without imposing itself or quite being named. What we thought we were seeing straight on begins to shift. The work is no longer merely an image, or even a material: it becomes a space of encounter.
In that interval, the viewer is no longer entirely outside what they are looking at. They enter into a quieter, more uncertain relationship, in which something changes—in the work, perhaps, but also in themselves.
Perhaps that is where presence begins.