Eyes for love

Western society tends to fantasize that Saturdays are mostly meant for love —romantic love, to be more specific— even when that happens only in dreams or desire, including breakups or any other expression around it. But life doesn’t care about the names of “days” or our fragmented and cosmetic conception of time.

We prefer to cheat ourselves with the illusion of happiness at all costs. The idea of giving sense or meaning to our routine standards is pointless —especially on weekends— because pauses confront us with our own mortality, with the fact that disappointment is always ready to remind us that we live in a universe as unfaithful as a “paid love.” But aren’t we humans ritual creatures, and isn’t love a ritual too?

Ill-Matched Loveyes, digital intervention on the original Quentin Massys' painting: Ill-Matched Lovers, 1520-1525

Under that order of ideas, has romantic love evolved in tandem with science and tech or, as any other human pulsion, only gotten more sophisticated along with them? I truly don’t have an answer, only the question that masterfully Quinten Massys sheds light on with his Ill-Matched Lovers: when is love really love? Does the ritual of love come with a price, and if so, does that make love less love? Because in the end, the disembodied image of Massys’ painting is as much a fact as it is an allegory.

Nevertheless, there is no such thing as coincidence, even for love.

Eyes for love