"She closed her eyes – not to escape, but to see more clearly."

— a title like an incantation at the threshold of revelation. With these simple words, painter Valentina Banović opens her work "Inner Silence" (2025, oil on canvas, 50 x 70 cm), not toward an external narrative, but toward a space of deep contemplation — a pictorial silence that lives within the boundaries of line, color, and meaning. This is a portrait, but not an ordinary one. It is a metaphysical self-portrait of the inner humanity — of womanhood itself, but also of the archetype of the being who seeks, in the darkness behind closed eyelids, that which the daylight of the world cannot reveal.

In the history of painting, the portrait has often been understood as a representation — of social status, of individual identity, of idealized beauty. But the great moments in portraiture arise not when the artist merely copies a face, but when they succeed in transposing an ontological tension, a questioning of being. From the haunting expression in Rembrandt’s portraits to the psychological écorché of Egon Schiele, or the soul geometries traced in the works of Lucian Freud, the portrait becomes a metaphysical act.

Valentina Banović falls into this lineage — whether consciously or not. The face she paints is not simply closed — it is a face closed inward, a surface that resists being read from the outside, offering instead a meditation on seeing and the unseen. The closed eyes are not a sign of withdrawal from the world, but of an inner "metanoia". In a world where the eye is bombarded by images, spectacle, simulacra — Banović closes the eyes of the portrait and tells us: "now true seeing begins."

This radical inversion of the gaze evokes the phenomenological philosophy of Edmund Husserl, and especially that of his successor, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, who spoke of the "flesh of the world" and of perception as a merging of subject and object. Banović’s painting does not depict — it feels visually. It does not impose a message but opens a resonance chamber, a poetic space where our gaze is reflected in the silence of the painted face.

In purely formal terms, "Inner Silence" stands out through a compositional austerity that evokes the linear and chromatic balance of the Dutch school, but reinterpreted through the sensitivity of modern painting. The 50 x 70 cm dimensions favor visual intimacy, a human scale that invites contemplative closeness, not monumental spectacle. The dark, saturated background absorbs contextual detail to emphasize the human form — a classical strategy found in Leonardo’s portraits and in the dramatic tension of Caravaggesque tenebrism. But Banović does not seek Baroque drama, rather the intimacy of unwavering stillness.

The contours are firm, yet not rigid. There is suppleness in the line of the neck, a fluidity in the tied-back hair, a delicacy in the curve of the lips — all shaping an essentialized femininity, not seductive but introspective, restrained, almost sacred. The closed eyelids become in themselves pictorial surfaces speaking of renunciation, of trust in the inner world.

The chromatic palette — with accents of lavender, pearly gray, fleshy tones and bluish shadows — creates an effect of interiorized chiaroscuro. If in Vermeer, light was a window onto the world, in Banović it seems like a reflection from the depths of being — a light that does not fall, but rises, from below, from a place where experience is purer than thought.

Though not explicitly aligned with Symbolism, Banović’s painting seems to spring from the same spiritual matrix. The Symbolists — Redon, Khnopff, and even Böcklin in certain works — were concerned with rendering an unseen world, a lucid dream, an inner mystery. Banović, similarly, does not employ narrative elements or allegories. Everything is conveyed through a single visual gesture — the closing of the eyes. And this gesture becomes the symbol of an entire universe.

In this turning inward, there is a kinship with Japanese aesthetics of silence and emptiness — the concept of "ma", which in Zen architecture represents the space between things, the interstice in which meaning dwells. The woman’s face is surrounded by a dense, almost musical void — and this absence of visual noise allows emotion to become audible. Thus, the portrait does not communicate by what it shows, but by what it refrains from saying.

Here, painting approaches poetry — silent poetry, closer in spirit to Paul Valéry or Rainer Maria Rilke — poets of the inner self, of active contemplation. Our gaze is invited to participate in this poetic act, not as observers, but as engaged witnesses.

The painted face is not excessively personalized. There are no accessories, no narrative background, no explicit symbols. This partial anonymity allows space for identification. Every viewer may project onto this face their own moment of recollection, their own interior figure. This is why Banović’s portrait also acquires an archetypal dimension — it becomes the universal image of the woman seeking answers not in the world, but within herself.

In a visual culture dominated by hyper-exposure, by the aesthetics of the selfie, of the gaze that always wants to capture and be captured, Banović proposes a radical counter-discourse — the face that does not look, does not demand to be seen, but allows itself to be beheld in the silence of its own meditation. It is an act of artistic humility — but also of creative power, for within this restraint lies, paradoxically, an immense evocative force.

Looking at this work, one cannot help but recall Plato’s myth of "anamnesis" — the idea that the soul, in order to know, does not need to learn, but to remember. In this sense, the closed eyes of the portrait can be interpreted as a gesture of returning to primordial knowledge, to truths from before forgetting. It is a portrait about essential memory, not about representation. The face is not an object — it is a palimpsest.

Just as Plato, in Phaedo, spoke of the philosopher’s death as a liberation from the senses in favor of pure thought, here too, the closing of the eyes is a symbolic act — a suspension of the senses in favor of inner contemplation. Banović thus approaches a form of philosophical painting, where the image becomes a meditation on the human condition, on knowledge, on silence as a form of revelation.

In a century dominated by algorithms, infinite image reproduction, and the aesthetics of perfectible digitalism, this work breathes with a sense of manual respiration, of ontological slowness. Oil on canvas — a traditional, organic, sensory medium — is reclaimed not out of nostalgia, but from the conviction that matter itself has memory, that the gesture of the hand is a form of thought.

Looking at this painting, we are reminded that painting is not just image — it is time sedimented in color, emotion filtered through gesture — traces of a soul thinking plastically. And in this age of simulation and post-truth, Valentina Banović’s gesture is one of poetic resistance. She paints not to show us something, but to stop us in our rush — and return us to the silence from which all essential questions begin.

/ INSTEAD OF A CONCLUSIONS /

"Inner Silence" is not just a portrait — it is a philosophical reflection on seeing, on interiority, on the beauty of silence that does not flee, but remains, contemplates, forgives, understands.

The closed gaze is not a withdrawal — but a silent leap beyond appearance, toward a territory where being no longer needs to defend itself, to explain, to respond. Valentina Banović does not paint the face of a woman fleeing — but of one who, at last, remains. In herself, with herself.

In this portrait, silence is not an absence, but a denser form of speech. It holds everything unsaid — and everything that can only be said through color, shadow, and inner tension.

"She closed her eyes – not to escape, but to see more clearly" thus becomes a mute prayer, a memento for each of us; that sometimes, closing our eyes is not to flee — but to finally, truly see.