I found the painting in a book. Magritte had painted his wife, her belly, her wrinkles, the specific weight of a body that had been lived in, and lit her with a candle that happened to be nearby.

Not a studio. Not a plan. The light of coincidences.I could not stop thinking about what that meant. That he had looked at her, and kept looking, and never decided she needed to be corrected.

The question the painting asks is a simple one: what if the body you have is already the subject?
Not the problem. Not the work-in-progress. The subject.

I built a set around three things he used : a candle, a shadow, a woman's body in available light.
I took everything else out of the room. I wanted to see if the question still worked when it was made of fabric and photography instead of oil on canvas.

I called it Illusion because I had learned from This Is Not a Pipe that the most honest thing you can say about a representation is that it isn't the thing itself. What you see on a screen when someone shows you beauty is not beauty. It is a picture of an agreement. The agreement can be broken.

I was at Parsons. I was nineteen or twenty. I didn't know what I was building toward. I had a candle and a fury I couldn't name yet, and that was enough to start.

This page exists because Pardonne Moi Père looks back at this work and recognizes something. Not its own beginning, that came later, with Succube. Something earlier than that. The first version of the question the house keeps asking.