THEORETICAL OBSERVATORY

Repetition as Difference: Ontology of the Identical (11-09-2025)

The first performance on the theme of repetition dates back to 1985. It was titled “Shared Breath.” The action consisted of handing five identical balloons—same shape, same color, same material—to five different people, asking each of them to fully inflate a balloon. Despite the absolute identity of the starting materials and the unity of the instruction, the final shapes were completely different. Each balloon had acquired a unique morphology, shaped by the breath, pressure, rhythm, and specific gestures of the person inflating it. In 2006, this research moved onto a pictorial plane, with the creation of some paintings defined by the paradoxical neologism “Unique Multiple.” The operation was not born from any mechanical reproduction ambition—absolute identity was impossible—the objective was to confirm, in the material reality of painting, what the balloon performance had already revealed: the ontological impossibility of identical repetition and, at the same time, its extraordinary generative fecundity. This process finds theoretical foundation in Kierkegaard’s concept of authentic repetition. For Kierkegaard, repetition is an existential movement that produces the new through the re-appropriation of the identical. The painting remains almost the same, but each time you see it under a different light because you have changed inside. In his thought, to repeat means to “re-grasp” existence differently each time: every attempt at repetition is actually an act of creation that transforms both the subject who repeats and the object repeated.

The question of repetition cannot be addressed with the tools of traditional aesthetics, which still feed on the 19th-century categories of originality and uniqueness of the artwork. Instead, it is necessary to penetrate the beating heart of an apparent contradiction: how can identical repetition generate difference? How can the same produce the different? The impossibility of identical repetition finds its deepest root in the temporal dimension of existence itself. Time, as a fundamental dimension, continuously modifies the space in which every repetitive act occurs, making any absolute identity ontologically impossible. Every gesture, every brushstroke, every attempt at identical reproduction is inscribed in a unique and unrepeatable temporal moment that radically transforms the spatial coordinates of the action. Time is not simply a neutral background in which repetition unfolds, but the active force that constantly deforms and reshapes the space of the artwork, preventing two creative moments from ever perfectly coinciding. The temporal transformation of space creates what we could call a “field of ontological differentiation” in which every repetition, by the sole fact of occurring at a different time, is inscribed in a qualitatively changed space and thus necessarily generates a singular identity. The decision to create a series of paintings all identical—same subject, same colors, identical composition—belongs to a profound philosophical tradition that finds in “Defunctionalizations” a fundamental theoretical precedent: the process through which objects, deprived of their original function, acquire new morphology and new ontological determination. To fully understand the meaning of the repetitive choice, it must be placed within an artistic-theoretical path that has shown how the intentional breaking of the object’s function automatically generates a transformation of meaning: the “A-intact” object with “B-coherent” meaning, once compromised in its functionality, becomes “A-mutated” and acquires a new “C-native” determination. This process of transformation through negation finds a surprising parallel in the practice of identical repetition. Here too it is an apparently destructive operation—the negation of originality, uniqueness, novelty—that instead produces a generative effect. Each 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. It does not merely produce copies but activates a continuous metamorphosis process 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 reproducible merchandise and celebrating the aesthetics of the identical—here, pictorial repetition asserts the irreducible resistance of the creative gesture to any automation. It is not about multiplying to spread but repeating to discover. Each 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 assume reproducibility as a fact and aesthetically explore it, here the repetitive intention is assumed to philosophically discover the impossibility of repetition. One knows the paintings will not be identical, yet persists in the intention to make them so. What makes this operation philosophically relevant is the awareness of this paradox. It is precisely the tension between the will for identity and the necessity of difference that constitutes the theoretical core of the artistic project. Each painting is inscribed in a specific temporality that determines its singularity. As the same painting is produced, the hand retains the muscular memory of previous gestures, but this memory does not translate into mechanical automatism. On the contrary, it creates a temporal tension field in which past and present intertwine in always new configurations. The memory of the previous gesture influences the present one but does not completely determine it. Between memory and act opens a space of creative freedom that no repetitive intention can eliminate. The series thus appears as a sort of existential chronicle, a temporal record of transformations through the repeated practice of the same gesture. Each work is a distinct moment, connected to previous works by a temporal thread that traverses and unifies them.

For Deleuze, when we repeat something, we are actually always repeating difference—that is, we always create something unique through the gesture that tries to be the same. It’s like when you try to trace a drawing: every time you redo the same movement, something slightly different comes out, something that belongs only to that moment. Every 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 identity model; it is 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 about measuring the faithfulness of each painting to an original but about grasping the irreducible singularity expressed by each one. The choice of the pictorial medium is not accidental, although not exclusive. Painting, more than any other artistic form, makes the impossibility of identical repetition evident. Every brushstroke or color variation leaves 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 rather its very foundation. It is precisely because painting opposes mechanical repetition that it becomes the chosen medium to explore the philosophical paradoxes of authentic repetition. Nevertheless, these theoretical principles are not limited to the pictorial field alone. 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 necessity of difference. Each expressive medium will offer its own specific material and temporal resistances to identical repetition, thus generating differential fields peculiar but philosophically akin to the pictorial one. Each new repetition cycle carries the temporal weight of the previous one, creating what we might call an “aesthetic and conceptual distortion” analogous to that described in Defunctionalizations. Just as the mind continues to recognize the original morphology of the defunctionalized object due to mnemonic information linked to its “former” meaning, so the experience of the new series will inevitably be filtered through the memory of the previous one. From this perspective, each work in the series should not be evaluated in relation to the others but grasped in its absolute singularity. The series 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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