text= Born in Switzerland, Alberto Giacometti was the son of a famous Swiss painter. He moved to Paris in 1922, where he began his study of sculpture with Antoine Bourdelle. a pupil of Rodin. He  began experimenting with forms of free association taught by Surrealist movement. During the 1930 he then began a painful search for the means to re-present the human figure in its real situation in space. His ideas on that he developed in the late 1930s, were moving in directions similar to those of the major philosophers in France, Paul Sartre, which developed fresh theories of perception that influenced the post-World War II artists

His creative process was closely linked with the act of seeing; more than seeing is really engaging with the act and experience of looking.  The question is about space: How to portray a 3D space into a pictorial space? The constant act of looking and re-looking is present in each of his paintings.  

Laborious quick strokes  lie in the surfaces of his canvases and drawings. The strokes have the purpose of getting closer to a likeness, and at the same time denying it.  The act of not recognizing what is drawn and seen, and then slowly muse and find the visual cues that will open up a window within the painting. The length  of the stroke relates to the gaze; a gaze that  surfaces and retreats into a space that lives between what sees and what is seenŠ

"It might be supposed that realism consists in copying a glass as it is on thetable. In fact, one never copies anything but the vision that remains of it ateach moment, the image that becomes conscious. You never copy the glasson the table; you copy the residue of a vision.... Each time I look at theglass, it has an air of remaking itself, that's to say, its reality becomesuncertain, because its projection in my head is uncertain, or partial. Onesees it as if it were disappearing, coming into view again, disappearing,coming into view again-that's to say, it really always is between being and not being. And it's this that one wants to copy. [1964]