The Eye of Love

Love, a delicate network of branching limbs, intertwined, intricately woven. Barely visible, it celebrates tenderness and gentleness in a haven of serenity. It is bedded in soft nights, in yearning breath, in the desire for everlasting permanence.

Taking a belated honeymoon in 1952, photographer René Groebli and his wife Rita spent two weeks in the Parisian district of Montparnasse. A year later, Groebli turned 25 selected photographs of the journey into a picture essay that has made photographic history.

Boundless love on pale skin emerged in a "lost time" – truly lost because in 1950s Switzerland, photography was under the sway of reportage with its pursuit of reality, objectivity and cool impartiality. It seems that subtlety and delicacy of feeling had little appeal in those days, as demonstrated by a review published in the Neue Zürcher Zeitung in December 1954. Written off as scandalous, the essay was clearly misunderstood.

René Groebli's photographs kindle emotions. The sensitive choice of images and their sequence generate the impression of tracing the events of a single day. We find ourselves enveloped in a love poem without words, in a dance of light and shadow, in tender, sensitive being. We are immersed in a world of mystery that unveils glimpses of ineffably precious moments, moments so close they seem almost tangible.

Only the gaze is focused; it barely touches the female nude. The camera circles around her, captures her in a gentle caress, reveals demure grace and sensuous shadows in a mantle of blurred movement.

René Groebli is a poet beyond words, a master of creating the unprecedented, of communicating feelings and sensuality, of embracing erotic nuance. Near and far, shadow and light, day and night, everywhere and nowhere: the artist delves into the essence of being, the magic of "only one night". The modest Parisian hotel room has become a sheltering, loving space. Traces fade into the darkness, the photographer recedes into near invisibility. Object and room blend naturally and mindfully with subjectivity and intuition. Everything is one, buoyed only by the vibrancy of black and white. Never before and never since has anything comparable been created. A poetic ode without words. A declaration of love for Rita that could hardly be more timeless.

published in: René Groebli – Das Auge der Liebe. Sturm & Drang Publishers, 2020

What if walls were to breathe like the skin of one’s beloved? They would expand gently, with the panting of pleasure, while their backs would melt into the torn wallpaper. Who would not wish to be drawn into such a deep inner space of love? Protected by the walls of a small chamber in which the world is locked out, for it is a chamber fraught with love.

The walls are pulsating like a heart. A grainy commingling in the dusky light of intimacy, in the loving gaze. But the lid flutters above the eye, the eye of the camera, opening briefly like the aperture of the camera. Every bat of the eyelid captures the here and now like the lens of the camera. A transient here and now yet forever reprised in the eye of future viewers. And there they will rediscover themselves in the setting of their own lives, seduced by the power of the pictures in this series, made all the greater for omitting obscenity, the “backstage” of the act of love. Everyone knows it. The pull of being a twosome. Everyone has memories of slippers under the table, of laundry hung up to dry in the room. These objects form the words hung up, like clothes hung up to dry, on lines that form this visual poem of love.

To deflect the impact of such memories in our own lives as we leaf through The Eye of Love, we might find ourselves clinging to art historical reminiscences. We would then recognize in the neck of our beloved the similarly vulnerable neck pictured by Man Ray, or see his backlit photograph of Kiki and also, of course, the afterimage of Henri Cartier-Bresson’s “L’Araignée” at the sight of sheets mussed up on the bed: a picture in which the bodies of lovers, blurred, legs entwined, weave a spider web of pleasure.

It is no wonder that the series became the pedestal of Groebli’s international career and that one of the photographs, the sitting nude, made its way into Edward Steichen’s trailblazing exhibition “The Family of Man” at the Museum of Modern Art New York. The stunning power of Groebli’s 1952 series still takes our breath away, the more so because we know full well that we are not looking at a model we might at most suspect of having an affair with the photographer but rather at the unmarred bliss of René Groebli und Rita freshly married in a hotel room in Paris. And we are all fully aware that the woman’s gleaming white dress, falling, gliding from her body into the rustling of blurred edges, betokens an encounter known to us from our own lives. The pleasure divined between the pictures in this series is as scandalous as the love and familiarity between two human beings is enduring and touching.

And so the chamber in Paris becomes the heart chamber into which we have all once fallen, into which we have all once sunk. In the hope that this narrow chamber will expand into the expanses of an entire life. In the hope that these split seconds will be burned into heart and mind – like René Groebli’s photographs on the retina of the viewer.

published in: René Groebli – The Magic Eye, 2020. Bildhalle Edition