Only In My Mind, 2024
Acrylic on canvas
38.2 × 51.2 in
When the mirror ceases to be a site of recognition and becomes a critical threshold: where the image insists, the body withdraws.
Only in My Mind belongs to the Behind the Obvious series, in which Abraham Aronovitch interrogates the bathroom mirror as a device of dissociation of the subject. Here, the mirror no longer operates as a surface of recognition, but as an autonomous space that maintains a gap between inner experience and its own image. The face-to-face encounter is avoided, revealing a provisional impossibility of aligning feeling with representation.
The painting suspends the subject in a state of silent tension. As the figure appears to withdraw, its reflection persists and asserts itself, creating a deferred form of consciousness. The work thus explores a moment of lucidity in suspension, where the mirror no longer serves to reveal, but to mark a necessary distance. Through this broken dialogue between the body and its image, Aronovitch stages the complexity of an identity that seeks itself through avoidance rather than direct confrontation.