THEORETICAL OBSERVATORY

Ontological Perspectivism and Mimesi (2008)

The Western philosophical tradition is born out of suspicion. Plato distrusts the artistic image because he conceives it as mimesis—an imitation of an imitation. The structure is hierarchical and relentless: the Idea constitutes authentic being; the sensible object represents its first imperfect copy; the work of art reproduces this already degraded copy. The painter who depicts an object stands three degrees away from the truth of the Idea, producing a simulacrum that distances us from knowledge rather than bringing us closer to it.
This conception rests on a fundamental assumption: reproduction necessarily entails an ontological loss. Every passage from one level to another implies a weakening of being, a progressive dilution of the original truth. Multiplication is equated with degradation; the copy can only be inferior to its model; the distance from the archetype measures the degree of falsification.

Specular reflection as ontological revelation

Let us consider, however, a different device: a painting placed between two parallel mirrors. Here mimesis operates according to a radically different logic. The specular system does not degrade the image through infinite reflection, but multiplies it while preserving its integrity. Each reflection retains the formal fullness of the original image. The reflected object possesses the same definition, the same presence, the same ontological density as the first. We do not witness a descending scale toward nothingness, but a horizontal proliferation of simultaneous existences. Multiplication here does not subtract being but expands it. The mirrors reveal a latent power within the image: the capacity to manifest itself in infinite places without fragmentation, to generate variations that do not compromise its essential identity. Each reflection maintains a direct and immediate relation with its source, without hierarchical mediation.This operation dismantles the Platonic conception of mimesis as a progressive departure from the true. If each reflection preserves the same ontological fullness, then multiplication is not dispersion but the revelation of what being has always been: not a fixed and immobile point in the hyperuranion, but a generative potency capable of manifesting itself in multiple forms without losing itself. The object does not undergo a diminution of reality through the reflective process; rather, it discovers its intrinsically plural nature—the capacity to be simultaneously present in different configurations while maintaining identity. The copy here is not a degradation of the original but its expansion, not a distancing from truth but a multiplication of its modes of existence.

Ontological perspectivism

A new conceptual framework thus takes shape. We are not speaking of epistemological perspectivism—how we see things—but of ontological perspectivism: how things are. Every reproduction, every reflection, is not an error of reality with respect to a unique and privileged model, but an authentic manifestation endowed with full ontological status. Truth ceases to be a fixed point from which everything derives and becomes the dynamic sum of all its possible manifestations. Not a hierarchical pyramid with the Idea at the summit and degraded copies at the base, but a reticular structure in which every node possesses the same ontological weight. The universe is not impoverished by the multiplication of images; it is constitutively enriched by the coexistence of parallel and simultaneous levels of reality.Here the decisive rupture with the Platonic tradition emerges. The work reflected in the mirror is no less real than the work on the canvas. They are two ontological facts that coexist—two ways in which being manifests itself, with neither privileged over the other. Reflection does not subtract reality from the reflected object; it creates a new space of existence in which that object manifests itself once again, whole. This vision dissolves the obsession with the original, the search for a privileged point of origin from which everything would derive. Reality exists in multiple forms, none of which can claim the status of being “truer” than the others.

Ontological perspectivism thus reconfigures the relation between identity and multiplicity. The identical can generate infinite variations without dissolving.

V R

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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