1. Troppo vero! Opacity, density, noise and thickness of images
Vlad Ionescu
Faculteit Architectuur en Kunst
Univeristeit Hasselt
Transparency and Translucence :
Transparency as an object of images (literal transparency, rendering it, as in Vanitas paintings of bubbles, David Bailly’s Vanitas with the portrait of a young painter (1651), Pierre Mignard’s Mademoiselle de Tours (c ) , Sir John Everett Millais’ A Child’s World (1886), Jan Molenaer’s Woman at her Toilet (1633)
Transparency as a function in architecture (phenomenal transparency that is opaque, translucent, ambivalent: translucency in Gothic architecture, the function of the red-velvet curtain covering Labruste’s storage room in the Bibliothèque Nationale, phenomenal transparency in OMA’s project for a large library in Paris, opacity as a superposition of planes that generates new meanings, sensations, transitions, evoking the compositional techniques of phasing in Steve Reich or the superposition of phrases in the poetics of Gherasim Luca and Samuel Beckett.
General hypothesis:
transparency is artistically productive when it meets opacity or a form of resistance, irregularity, discontinuity because only then the superposition of planes mediates new perspectives on representation;
transparency is critically significant when it confronts us with its material limits: the case of Forensic Architecture.

2. MIGNARD Pierre - Mademoiselle de Tours c 1681-82
MOLENAER Jan Miense- Woman at her toilet 1633

3. OMA, competition for a new national library in France,
Très Grande Bibliothèque (1989)

4. 2. Transparent windows
Albertian costruzione legittima a transparent screen that is “altogether vitreous and transparent” (admodum vitrea et perlucida), the paradigm that inspired Brunelleschi’s perspectival rendering and the “mirror stage” of painting (H. Damisch), an abstract origin of visual representation relying on a stable, unmoving eye.
Alberti, De punctis et lineis apud pictures

5. “Unione” : 16th century notion in art theory referring to the union of colors meant to produce harmonious resolutions (Raphael), the glazing of transparent layers and other diaphanous effects in Venetian paintings.
Raphael - Fornarina c. 1518, detail
Raphael - Conestabile Madonna c , detail

6. 3. Stains, Veils, dust or on opacity in painting:
“pittura di tocco e di macchia” , painting by touch and stain,
Transparent veils from Titian and Tintoretto to Francis Bacon
BACON - Study after Velázquez’s Portrait of Pope Innocent X (1953)
TITIAN - Portrait of Cardinal Filippo Archinto (now dated 1558)
TITIAN - Portrait of Filippo Archinto ( )

7. JACOPO BASSANO - Suzanne & the elders (1585), detail
TINTORETTO - St Mark's body brought to Venice , detail
TINTORETTO - St Nicholas (1544)

8. transparency is critically significant when it confronts us with its material limits: the case of Forensic Architecture.

9. The ruins of the crematorium II, Auschwitz-Birkenau
The ruins of the crematorium II, Auschwitz-Birkenau. Arrows pointing to the probable location of the holes in the ceiling

10. The roof of the crematorium II in horizontal position
The roof of the crematorium II in horizontal position. On 25 August 1944, a US Air Force photographer, Nevin Bryant, pointed out that the four dots are chimneys used for the Zyklon B pesticide. The short path next to the hole on the right represents a member of the SS, possibly caught in the act of gassing.