My Heart Still Beats for You Matte Paper Print - 18" x 24"

Desire. “We always want what we don’t have,” the famous saying goes. Indeed, we seem to always want an object that is just out of reach, that is consistently outside of ourselves, some ‘other’ that we believe should be integrated with us. Why? Why do we perceive ourselves as lacking? What is it about this lack that compels us to restlessly seek out newer and newer objects to somehow satisfy our desire? One answer to these questions, according to the ideas of Jacques Lacan, is that desire is a structure and not an object. Imagine that you are in a dark room and a spotlight follows a ballerina. You think your desire is for this dancer, but the ballerina can be exchanged for someone else, or an object such as a painting, a car, a lottery ticket, and so on. The “ballerina” could be anyone, any object. Imagine you turn around and instead of looking at the stream of objects the spotlight is showing you, you see the spotlight itself--the structure directing your interest. It is this structure that is desire, not the various objects or people that come and go in the spotlight. Desire is an internal structure of the psyche that shows you object after object, person after person, item after item in an endless conveyor belt that cannot be satisfied–because what we desire is not the person or object on the conveyor belt, but the "spotlight": the desiring itself. We want the spotlight, whatever it shows us is less important. We want to keep on desiring, so “we always want what we don’t have.”

This painting is a visual reminder of this psychodynamic. “My heart still beats for you” precisely because one wants to keep on desiring, even when the object of one's desire has left.

While the original sold with a market value in the thousands, this matte paper print is a way to experience the symbolism and story of the piece, and my hope is that each time you see your new print, you feel connected to the structure of desire and have an empowered awareness of where it is taking you on the journey of your life; that you are empowered to decide what is and is not worth desiring.

• Paper thickness: 10.3 mil
• Paper weight: 189 g/m²
• Opacity: 94%
• ISO brightness: 104%

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