The hand on the arm (or in this case the naked calf): affectionate, reassuring – or restraining, controlling, possessive? The expression that we can see on the face of the hand’s owner (the other face is turned away from us and invisible): peaceful and content, or smugly arrogant, or both? The juxtaposition of naked and clothed bodies inevitably raises questions of power, of different kinds – which of course doesn’t preclude affection, or love, but it undoubtedly complicates it. And we observe the scene, and wonder what’s going on, and what the painter thought was going on and intended us to see.

Well, not according to whoever wrote the captions for the Lucian Freud exhibition currently at the National Gallery. This was one of the highlights of a rare weekend in London, mostly focused on jazz concerts. I love Freud’s art, and they had all my favourites (including the one of QEII, which feels even more magnificent and Velazquezian now its subject has died, and still hilarious although presumably the original outrage will rapidly disappear; I just wish it had been a full-scale Portrait including some corgis). But I am still feeling aggravated by the dogmatism of some of the labels, especially the insistence that Two Men (1988) is simply a picture of affection, nothing else to see here.

Do people just not like complexity any more? The National Galleries Scotland webpage for the picture talks of "underlying tension" in an apparently peaceful scene, which seems more reasonable, but I’d prefer to go with ambiguity – not least, the possibility that in sleep both men are revealing feelings or instincts that they might not admit even to themselves, the touch, the expression, turning away. And of course fbis is the artist’s interpretation, or extrapolation, or projection, rather than ‘reality’.

Okay, I do tend to be a bit obsessive about the idea of deliberate ambiguity and undecidability in artistic creations, as the core of my reading of Thucydides in contrast to interpretations that insist that this time the true objective intent of his narrative has been identified. And, to be fair, I assume the job of an exhibition curator is partly to come up with something new to say, breaking away from the well-established "he was a cold-hearted bastard who looked into his subjects’ souls" school of Freud criticism (admittedly an interpretation that he himself deliberately invites in some of his work). "Nothing awkward or psychological to see here, just admire the brush technique and move along" is certainly new; I guess I would just prefer to see it raised as another possibility rather than asserted as truth…