The Unknown Religion of the Gaze

This series of drawings presents close-ups of the eyes of wild animals. It is an attempt to enter a space of vision that remains largely unreadable to humans—foreign, yet strangely familiar. We look into the eyes of beings whose language we do not understand, but whose presence we recognize instinctively.

The animal’s gaze is not an image or a symbol. It is an event. Within it appears something that precedes culture and language—a primal relation between seeing and being seen. In this brief encounter an atavism returns, a trace of an ancient kinship between species, inscribed somewhere deep within our perception.

Perhaps before religions emerged, before systems of belief and images of gods were formed, there existed a simpler form of experience: the silent tension of gazes exchanged between living beings. Human and animal meet in a moment of pure presence.

This relation remains unknown to us, yet fundamentally shared. The gaze of the animal can therefore be understood as a fragment of an archaic ritual—a remnant of a forgotten “religion of the gaze” common to all living creatures.