THEORETICAL OBSERVATORY

Repetition as Difference, Ontology of the Identical

Long before philosophy named it, the mechanism of repetition and difference manifests itself in history, in nature, and in human experience. The identical never truly returns as identical, but always modified by time, by context, and by the point of view of the observer. It happens in nature too: similar forms never coincide perfectly, and what appears equal always reveals a variation. It is within this space between the desire to repeat and the inevitability of difference that my research is situated. The first performance on the theme of repetition dates back to 1985 and was titled The Shared Breath. The action consisted in giving five identical balloons, of the same shape, the same color, and the same material, to five different people, asking each of them to inflate them completely. Despite the identity of the starting materials and the univocity of the instruction, the final forms were completely different. In 2006, the research was transferred to the pictorial plane, resulting in several paintings defined by the paradoxical neologism Unique Multiple. The aim was to confirm, on the plane of pictorial materiality, what the balloon performance had already revealed, namely the impossibility of identical repetition and, at the same time, its generative fecundity. The question of repetition cannot be addressed with the tools of traditional aesthetics, which still feed on the nineteenth-century categories of originality and uniqueness of the work of art. Instead, one must enter the heart of an apparent contradiction. How can identical repetition generate difference? How can the same produce the different? Time, as a fundamental dimension, continuously modifies the space in which every repetitive act takes place, making any absolute identity impossible.

The fundamental point can be understood from Einstein’s theory of relativity, which has shown us that time and space are not the same for everyone, are not fixed, but change depending on who observes and from where they observe. In relativity, space and time are the very fabric of reality, a dynamic field in which every event occupies an unrepeatable “here-and-now.” If two events seem identical, in reality they are never truly so, because the conditions in which they occur change. Time changes, position changes, point of view changes. Even if we try to repeat the same action, we are no longer in the same instant and we are no longer exactly the same. For this reason, perfect repetition is impossible. Not because we make mistakes, but because reality itself does not allow it. What we call “identical” is not something stable, but something that depends on the relations in which it is situated. And difference is not an error or a deviation, but a generative factor that makes every real experience possible. The decision to create a series of paintings all the same, with the same subject, the same colors, the same composition, finds a theoretical precedent in a concept I theorized in the 1980s and named Defunctionalizations. This is a process through which objects, deprived of their original function, acquire a new morphology and a new ontological determination. In other words, the object deprived of its function is reborn with its own meaning, independent of the original one. This process of transformation through negation finds a parallel in the practice of identical repetition. Every repetition of the painting is like a defunctionalization of the previous work. It deprives the latter of its claim to uniqueness and originality, but precisely through this deprivation it generates new possibilities of meaning. Repetition, like defunctionalization, is an operator of ontological transformation that does not merely produce copies, but activates a process of continuous metamorphosis in which each work retroactively redefines the meaning of all the others. Certain artistic practices use seriality to reflect and incorporate the logic of mass production, transforming art itself into a reproducible commodity and celebrating the aesthetics of an only apparently identical. Here, by contrast, pictorial repetition asserts the irreducible resistance of the creative gesture to every automatism. It is not a matter of multiplying in order to disseminate, but of repeating in order to discover. Every new painting is not a more or less successful copy of an original, but the emergence of an absolute singularity that asserts itself precisely through the repetitive intention. It is the complete reversal of serial logic. While some practices take reproducibility as a given and explore it aesthetically, here repetitive intention is assumed in order to discover philosophically the impossibility of repetition. It is precisely the tension between the will to identity and the necessity of difference that constitutes the theoretical core of the artistic project. Every painting is inscribed in a specific temporality that determines its singularity. As one proceeds in the realization of the same painting, the hand retains the muscular memory of previous gestures, but this memory does not translate into mechanical automatism. Between memory and act there opens a space of creative freedom that no repetitive intention can eliminate. Every work is a moment in itself and is connected to the previous works by a temporal thread that traverses and unifies them. An echo of this mechanism already appears in Kierkegaard, for whom repetition is an existential movement that reclaims existence in an ever-different way. In my research, however, it is not the existential dimension that makes difference necessary, but the very structure of Einsteinian spacetime, in which two events cannot occur simultaneously in an absolute way.

For Deleuze, when we repeat something, we are in fact always repeating difference; that is, we always create something unique through the gesture that would like to be identical. It is like trying to trace a drawing with a pencil. Each time the same movement is repeated, something slightly different emerges, something that belongs only to that moment. Each painting is therefore not a more or less successful attempt to copy the others, but the manifestation of something absolutely unique. Difference is not an error with respect to a perfect model of identity, but the force that generates the new through repetition itself. This conceptual reversal has profound consequences for the aesthetic evaluation of the work. It is no longer a matter of measuring the fidelity of each painting to an original, but of grasping the singularity that each one expresses. The choice of the pictorial medium is not accidental. Painting, more than any other artistic form, makes evident the impossibility of identical repetition. Every brushstroke and every chromatic variation leave unique material traces. However, in this practice, the material resistance of the medium does not constitute a limit to the realization of the repetitive project, but its very foundation. It is precisely because painting resists mechanical repetition that it becomes the privileged medium for exploring the philosophical and physical paradoxes inherent in repetition. Repetition as an operator of ontological transformation can extend to other expressive forms, from sculpture to performance, from writing to musical composition, wherever it is possible to establish that fundamental tension between repetitive intention and the necessity of difference. Every new cycle of repetition carries with it the temporal weight of the preceding one. Every work in the series is not to be evaluated in relation to the others, but grasped in its absolute singularity. It is not a collection of variants around a theme, but a multiplicity of singularities, each asserting itself in its own difference

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Spatio-temporal Unrepeatability b1-b2. 1985-2025©. Acrylic on wood, electric wire, porcelain. Approx. 84x64 cm each

Spatio-temporal Unrepeatability x51-x52. 1985-2025©. Acrylic on wood, electric wire, porcelain. Approx. 85x65 cm each.

Space-Time Unrepeatability. 2004-2025©. Acrylic on wood, electric wire, porcelain. 115x85x25 cm.

Unique multiple. 2004-2006©. Acrylic on wood. 36x26 cm each.

Catalogued Water no. 52 (Repetition and Difference) 2004–2006. 50x80 cm, acrylic on cardboard, sheets of paper

Mirrored Legs - Repetition and difference 1995. 80x35 cm (diptych). Acrylic and wax on analog photograph mounted on aluminum - private collection

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