Pages, 1967, Romany Eveleigh

"Romany Eveleigh covered a sheet of paper with a layer of black ink, followed by a layer of white oil paint. Scratching hundreds of small circles into the wet paint, she revealed the dark ink beneath. The resulting pattern, which can be read as repetitions of the letter ‘o’, is reminiscent of text. The formation of the circles into columns suggests the pages of a book, with blocks of text and empty margins. Eveleigh’s use of the visual language of writing and printing was inspired by the tabloid newsprint pages plastered on walls in the streets of Rome where she lived."

[https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/eveleigh-pages-t16086]

Pages can be read as an expression of Wilfred Bion’s O: a form of emotional reality that cannot be directly represented. Its repeated perforations create a “holey space” (cf. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus) that weakens denotation and allows access to what is normally unsayable. Psychoanalysis, in this view, is a process of “mining” for O by creating conditions where it can emerge indirectly.

In A Seminar in Paris (1978) Bion said about this aesthetic process of psychoanalysis:

It is very important to be aware that you may never be satisfied... if you feel that you are restricted to what is narrowly called a 'scientific' approach. You will have to be able to have a chance of feeling that the interpretation you give is a beautiful one, or that you get a beautiful response from the patient. This aesthetic element of beauty makes a very difficult situation tolerable. It is so important to dare to think or feel whatever you do think or feel, never mind how un-scientific it is.