The substantial photographic archive that Els Vanden Meersch has collected since 1996, is ordered in a classification system of 25 sections. The most eye-catching note in that index is probably the sixth: ‘Eye Walls:’. This is, indeed, a neologism. Yet any observant person can conjure up, even without any accompanying visual material, an image in his mind. The term points to walls with eyes. It indicates walls that can ‘look’. The idea that walls might be able to stare at us, is hardly new. The most famous example is probably that of the ultramodern villa Arpel in Jacques Tati’s film Mon Oncle (1958). This futuristic house, with its facade incorporating two round porthole-like windows, looks like a post-surrealist house come to life straight out of one of René Magritte’s paintings. Completely surrounded by a wall, this house, including a monstrous garage with a massive two-eyed opening and closing gate, is a fortress, a petrified apparatus for spying on the unsafe outside world.

André Malraux, too, strengthened by historic examples, already knew that walls possess a strange ability to see. In the last, revised edition of his Le musée imaginaire (1965), he inserts an important passage in the third chapter in which he represents a Tower with Faces from Khmer art (12th-13th century) next to a Malinese fetishist cave. The striking factor in these mirroring pages, which allow themselves to be visually analysed as an elementary Rorschach test, is that the figurative carved face in Angkor Thom has half-open eyes and a full mouth with thick lips, whereas the African Dogon artefact is just a geometric-abstract rendering of two adjacent, quasi-square holes. Underneath there is an oblong mouth opening, although that is practically entirely blocked by gigantic tree stumps and boulders – so it can be reduced to a thin horizontal slit. The figurative face of the Cambodian artefact didn’t leave us in any doubt as it was, but even without that accompanying ‘mirror image’ it was perfectly clear: we view the entrance to that cave as if it were a face. It stares at us, and we look back, fascinated.

It doesn’t seem obvious for people to be able to see a surface with a number of holes as a face. Yet it is part of the fundamental principles of human vision, which have meanwhile been well charted by visual semiotics. In Languages of Art (1968), for instance, Nelson Goodman convincingly argues that the relationship of similarity between a representation and the reality to which it refers is always based on symbolic relations, not natural or innate ones.4 People share a conventionally determined set of visual concepts, which among others enables them to see certain compositions of lines and/or colours as a face.

Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari devote an important chapter in their key work A Thousand Plateaus (1980) to this special human skill. Under the title ‘Year Zero : Faciality’ they describe the face as resulting from, emerging from a structured system of relations between a white wall and a black hole.5 The face, for them, is a flat visual surface that begins to leave a faint imprint on the white wall and in the black hole. But these relations are changeable and unstable: for Deleuze and Guattari it might as well be a black wall and a white hole allowing a face to take shape. This concerns a continuous mechanism of movement, generating ‘facial’ meaning. Approaching the photo series Paranoid obstructions from this angle, we can virtually see an endless sequence of ‘faces’, of emerging looks from ‘eye walls’ wanting to communicate with us.