There is a particular pleasure in going back to something already known, and it is not the pleasure of discovery. It is closer to the pleasure of a second conversation with somebody met once, where the preliminaries are out of the way and the talk can start somewhere further along.
A work seen for the first time absorbs most of its attention in simply being identified. The eye settles the basic questions, what it shows, roughly how old it is, how large it turns out to be in the room rather than on the page, and by the time those are answered the energy for anything else has usually gone. First visits are mostly administration.
The second visit starts after all that. The subject has stopped being news, so the eye wanders to the parts that were skipped: an edge left unresolved, a passage painted thinly where everything around it is thick, a correction showing faintly through the surface where the maker changed their mind. Nicole Brachetti Peretti finds that almost everything worth noticing about a work arrives on a later visit, and almost nothing arrives on the first.
The third and fourth visits do something different again. By then the work has become familiar enough that it stops being looked at and starts being checked, which sounds like a loss and is not. Checking is how a person notices that a picture seems different today, and a picture that seems different today is a picture that is being seen properly rather than remembered.
Most of that difference is in the viewer. The work is reliably the same object, kept in reliable conditions by people whose job it is to keep it that way. What changes is the weather, the hour, the mood carried in from outside, the years since the last visit. A work returned to over a long period is one of the few available instruments for measuring one's own changes, since it holds still while everything else does not.
There is a quieter argument here about collections in general. The familiar work is usually not the celebrated one. It is the one in the corner room that nobody queues for, chosen at some point for reasons long since forgotten and kept because the relationship continued. The art pages keep running into this. The works that hold up over decades are rarely the ones that announced themselves loudest at the start.
Late October is a good month for going back to something. The visiting season has settled, the light falls lower and warmer across a wall, and the rooms are quiet enough to stay in one place for a while. A second visit in late October costs almost nothing beyond the walk there.
None of which makes a first visit less worthwhile. It simply means the first visit was never the point. The journal keeps the rest of the month, the gallery holds the images, and the companion note on slow practice and steady learning comes at the same ground from another angle.