THEORETICAL OBSERVATORY

Introduction

The concept of "repetition and difference" did not originate with Kierkegaard, nor subsequently with Deleuze. It was already at work in nature and in human behaviour, without yet having a name. History offers an eloquent demonstration. The Renaissance seeks to repeat the classical Greek world, but it is not the classical Greek world. In the attempt to repeat it, it produces something different, bearing the marks of time elapsed, of accumulated experiences, of a world transformed in the meanwhile. This difference grows and intensifies until it determines Mannerism, then the Baroque, then the Rococo. Each passage further radicalizes the distance from the origin. Then it begins again. Neoclassicism seeks to repeat the classical Greek world. But it is not Greece, and it is not the Renaissance. It is a repetition that generates a new difference, distinct from all previous ones. This is the mechanism of history. Nature itself confirms the same principle. Two flowers of the same type, grown on the same plant, exposed to the same light, are never identical. The veining of a petal, the curve of the stem, the distribution of pigment, every detail reveals a difference that no repetitive intention has been able to eliminate. And on the biological plane the mechanism is even more radical, every living being is a repetition of the genetic code of its parents, yet every repetition introduces microscopic mutations. Evolution is nothing other than difference accumulated through millions of repetitions. Life itself does not know the identical, it knows only variations on a theme that never ceases to transform itself. Physics too confirms the same principle. Einstein, with the theory of special relativity, demonstrated that time does not flow in the same way for all observers and in all contexts. Two events can never be truly simultaneous. This means that every repetition occurs in a physically different time. And a different time is already a different reality. Perfect repetition is not simply difficult to achieve, it is physically impossible for a structural reason. Time itself prevents it. This is the mechanism of reality. In the attempt to repeat the identical, difference is always generated. We can therefore affirm that Søren Kierkegaard and Gilles Deleuze did not invent the concept of "repetition and difference", they recognized and gave a precise name to something that already existed.

Repetition as Difference: Ontology of the Identical

The first performance on the theme of repetition dates back to 1985. It was entitled "Shared Breath". The action consisted in handing five identical balloons, same shape, same colour, same material, to five different people, asking each of them to inflate them fully. Despite the absolute identity of the starting materials and the unambiguity of the instruction, the final forms were completely different. Each balloon had acquired a unique morphology, determined by the breath, the pressure, the rhythm and the specific gestures of the person who had inflated it. In 2006, the research was transposed onto the pictorial plane, producing a series of paintings defined by the paradoxical neologism "Unique Multiple". The operation did not arise from any ambition of mechanical reproduction, absolute identity was impossible, the objective was to confirm, on the plane of pictorial materiality, 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 a theoretical counterpart in what Kierkegaard defined as authentic repetition. For Kierkegaard, repetition is an existential movement that produces the new through the resumption of the identical. The painting remains almost the same, but each time you see it in a different light because you have changed within. In his thought, to repeat means to "re-seize" existence in an ever different way: every attempt at repetition is in reality an act of creation that transforms both the subject who repeats and the object repeated.

The question of repetition cannot be approached with the tools of traditional aesthetics, that which still feeds on the nineteenth-century categories of originality and the uniqueness of the work of art. It is necessary instead to penetrate to 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 very temporal dimension of existence. Time, as a fundamental dimension, continuously modifies the space in which every repetitive act occurs, rendering any absolute identity ontologically impossible. Every gesture, every brushstroke, every attempt at identical reproduction inscribes itself in a unique and unrepeatable temporal moment that radically transforms the spatial coordinates of the action. Time is not simply the neutral background against which repetition unfolds, but the active force that constantly deforms and reshapes the space of the work, preventing two creative moments from ever perfectly coinciding. The temporal transformation of space creates what we might call a "field of ontological differentiation" in which every repetition, by the mere fact of occurring at a different time, inscribes itself in a qualitatively altered space and therefore necessarily generates a singular identity. The decision to produce a series of paintings all identical, same subject, same colours, identical composition, inscribes itself in a profound philosophical tradition that finds in the "Defunctionalizations" a fundamental theoretical precedent: that process through which objects, deprived of their original function, acquire new morphology and new ontological determination. To fully understand the significance of the repetitive choice, it must be situated within an artistic-theoretical trajectory that has shown how the intentional breaking of object function automatically generates a transformation of meaning. The object "A-intact" with meaning "B-coherent", once compromised in its functionality, becomes "A-altered" and acquires a new determination "C-native". This process of transformation through negation finds a parallel in the practice of identical repetition. Here too we are dealing with an apparently destructive operation, the negation of originality, uniqueness, novelty, which instead produces a generative effect. Every repetition of the painting is like a "defunctionalization" of the preceding work. It strips the latter of its claim to uniqueness and originality, but precisely through this privation generates new possibilities of meaning. Repetition, like defunctionalization, is an operator of ontological transformation. It 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 reproducible commodity and celebrating the aesthetics of the identical. Here pictorial repetition instead affirms 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. 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 certain practices assume reproducibility as given and explore it aesthetically, here the repetitive intention is assumed in order to discover philosophically the impossibility of repetition. One knows that the paintings will not be identical, and yet one persists in the intention of making them so. What makes this operation philosophically relevant is the awareness of this paradox. It is precisely the tension between the will to identity and the necessity of difference that constitutes the theoretical nucleus of the artistic project. Each painting inscribes itself in a specific temporality that determines its singularity. As one proceeds in the execution of the same painting, the hand retains the muscular memory of previous gestures, but this memory does not translate into mechanical automatism. On the contrary, it creates a field of temporal tension in which past and present interweave in ever new configurations. The memory of the previous gesture influences the present one, but does not determine it completely. Between memory and act there opens a space of creative freedom that no repetitive intention can eliminate. The series presents itself thus as a kind of existential chronicle, a temporal record of transformations through the repeated practice of the same gesture. Each work is a moment in itself, and is connected to the preceding works by a temporal thread that runs through them and unifies them.

For Deleuze, when we repeat something, we are in reality always repeating difference, that is, we always create something unique through the gesture that would wish to be the same. It is like when you try to trace a drawing, every time you redo the same movement, 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 with respect to an original, but of grasping the irreducible singularity that each one expresses. The choice of the pictorial medium is not casual, though it is not exclusive. Painting, more than any other art form, makes evident the impossibility of identical repetition. Every brushstroke or chromatic variation leaves unique material traces. Yet 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 resists mechanical repetition that it becomes the elected medium for exploring the philosophical paradoxes inherent in repetition. These principles are not confined to the pictorial domain 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 institute that fundamental tension between repetitive intention and the necessity of difference. Each expressive medium will offer its own specific material and temporal resistances to identical repetition, generating differential fields that are peculiar yet philosophically homologous to the pictorial one. Each new cycle of repetition carries with it the temporal weight of the previous one, creating what we might call an "aesthetic and conceptual distortion" analogous to that described in the "Defunctionalizations". Just as the mind continues to recognize the original morphology of the defunctionalized object on account of the 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. In this perspective, each work in the series is not to 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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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.

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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