THEORETICAL OBSERVATORY

Temporality and Mimesis: The Work of Art as a Process Between Physics, Philosophy, and Memory (02-12-2024)

The project of temporal experiments, initiated in the 1980s, presents itself as an interdisciplinary inquiry intersecting art, physics, and philosophy. The artwork is not conceived as a static object but as a dynamic entity subject to a series of intentionally dated and documented transformations. This approach allows for an interrogation of the relationship between time, space, and identity, emphasizing the processual dimension of art.

Within the context of these experiments, time and space cease to be mere reference coordinates and become active, interacting variables. The adoption of a precise chronology of interventions—with exact dates and times—transforms the artwork into a living archive of processes, where every modification stands as testimony to an irreversible becoming.

Time, in its objectivity and unidirectionality, manifests as an agent of transformation that imprints itself upon matter, continuously redefining the boundaries of the artwork.

Space, far from being neutral, appears as an indefinite and malleable place, constantly reshaped by successive interventions.

This vision finds a parallel in Einstein’s theory of relativity, where time and space are inseparable and change according to the observer and the event. The artwork, therefore, becomes a laboratory of aesthetic and ontological relativity.

The two images emblematically document this tension:

The first represents the original state of the artwork, suggesting stability and completeness.
The second attests to the metamorphosis: the painting opens up, expands into space, acquires three-dimensionality, and breaks the linearity of the pictorial surface.

The recomposition and variation of form are not merely aesthetic gestures but acts that demonstrate time’s capacity to imprint itself and redefine the artwork’s identity. Each intervention is an act of knowledge, a challenge to the irreversibility of temporality.

The insertion of mirrors introduces an additional dimension, evoking Platonic mimesis. From this perspective, art becomes a reflection of an original idea, but here mimesis transforms into a critical interrogation:

The reflected image multiplies infinitely, fragments, moves away from its source, yet maintains an essential connection to it.
The mirrors do not simply duplicate form but multiply perceptual possibilities, opening the scene to a potentially infinite dimension.

This reflection operates a radical transformation of the concept of mimesis. Platonic mimesis presupposes an ontological degradation: each copy progressively distances itself from the truth of the original idea. For Plato, the artist produces an imitation of an imitation—the painted bed imitates the craftsman's bed, which in turn imitates the idea of bed—thus positioning itself at three degrees of distance from the true. In this case, however, the mirrors do not merely duplicate the image: they multiply it infinitely, creating a series of reflections that each maintain a direct and immediate relationship with the source, while generating a proliferation that challenges any attempt to identify a privileged point of origin. This operation reveals the inadequacy of the Platonic conception of mimesis as progressive degradation of truth: each reflection possesses the same ontological status, the same fullness of presence, demonstrating that multiplication can be preservation rather than distancing from being. The face painted inside the box does not undergo a loss of reality through infinite reflection, but discovers its own multiplicative power, the capacity to generate infinite variations that do not compromise essential identity.

If for Plato artistic mimesis was problematic because it distanced from knowledge of the true, here specular mimesis becomes an instrument that reveals the multiplicative power of being itself, the capacity of the identical to generate infinite variations without losing its own essence. The work demonstrates that multiplication does not necessarily equate to degradation, that the copy can preserve the ontological fullness of the original.

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Mimesis 7b and Temporal Action. (Temporal Experiments). 2008-2024-2025©. Originally 70x54x17 cm - later 70x35x28 cm, acrylic on panel, wood, mirrors. Work completed over 18 years. Begun on January 22, 2008. Resumed on September 7, 2024. The process of decomposition and transformations was completed on July 10, 2025 at 10:35 AM.

Temporal Experiments

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