What comes forward first is the breast. Through the black/white synthesis, the figure of Kaitlin becomes two shapes: the upper a curved outline of female torso, the form it traces among the most persistent subjects in human image-making. From Paleolithic Venus figurines through every sculptural tradition that has attended to the body, the female breast has been the form most freighted with human meaning. The synthesis has not abstracted Kaitlin out of existence; it has placed her in the longest lineage in art.
What comes forward first is the breast. Through the black/white synthesis, the figure of Kaitlin becomes two shapes: the upper a curved outline of female torso, the form it traces among the most persistent subjects in human image-making. From Paleolithic Venus figurines through every sculptural tradition that has attended to the body, the female breast has been the form most freighted with human meaning. The synthesis has not abstracted Kaitlin out of existence; it has placed her in the longest lineage in art.
The two-shape composition holds a formal ambiguity the image refuses to resolve: is this one figure or two, a body or its fragments? Sernet has described his method in terms of Wittgenstein's duck-rabbit, the figure that cannot be seen as both at once. Kaitlin I operates by the same principle: the upper curve reads as torso, the lower silhouette as leg or hip or the lower body in repose, and the black between them is the space a body makes by the way it arranges itself. The gap is posture made visible.
The universality Sernet pursues here is not an abstraction. The female body, and the breast specifically, is the one form that every human culture has represented, venerated, aestheticized, or contested. By arriving at this outline through the black/white synthesis, Sernet connects Kaitlin to every representation of the female form that has ever been made. The synthesis is not a veil; it is a lens that brings her into focus on the longest possible timescale.
