Even as a mere grand narrative—a huge fiction—Art has whims you hold to be true. Again, Foucault: “A real subjection is born mechanically from a fictitious relation.” You drink in the sadness from each canvas because it’s what you think should be drunk in, choose to suck in the nectar of little meaning from the slightest blossoming tale. Small wonder Balisi’s portrait of a flower has been inspired by the poem “The Road Not Taken” by Robert Frost—the archetypal Poet of Insight, our quintessential Western model of poetic craftsmanship that depicts the pathos of the Human Condition. A universe of woe in the slightest of sighs. Boohoo.

Because you want all of these things to be insightful, you want everything to mean something. You are scared of the meaningless image & the entropy it brings. You cannot leave event horizon: You have been sucked into this show & there is no going out. Made aware of the power relations between gallery & canvas, between canvas & yourself, you begin to long for change, for the strength & courage to throw rocks at the Panopticon of Art, at this phantom structure, the looming figure of the Father.

But “[p]ower has its principle not so much in a person as in certain concerted distribution of bodies, surfaces, lights, gazes; in an arrangement whose internal mechanisms produce the relation in w/c individuals are caught up. Consequently, it does not matter who exercises power.” W/c is to say there isn’t anyone or anything, really, to hurl stones at—no one except yourself. You thought it was the central power structure, but you were only wearing its orange sleeves, the structure’s dark pants. You have been manning the Panopticon all along. Such that when you look at a painting & think you are witnessing Balisi’s sadness, it is all but mere projection: It is your own sadness you see on each canvas—the sadness of your own insatiable need to find sadness where there is none.