The order of things

The mechanisms of repetition and representation of the forms of time

Abstract

Representation means bringing into form through cognitive skills the fragments of a world that has passed, is present, or has never existed. The imaginary world that bursts through the analytical capacities of our intellect unites and runs through fragments that are distant in time and space from each other, returning a dreamlike image. The heretical drawing faces the same rarefied constructive logic of the idea we have just outlined. The heresy lies in the geometric construction of the rhetorical and formal staging of the figures that inhabit the space of representation and that, at the moment in which they introduce the unexpected, dissent from the formal logic of the time in which the drawing itself is set. The heretical abstraction and imaginative figurativeness of the dystopian world represented by Hieronymus Bosch are an initial attempt to introduce heresy through the operations of scaling and assembling parts of figures that could never have existed in that way with each other, highlighting the complex reality of humanity and anthropic space. Bosch's architecture is an object of anthropomorphism, the fascination of contamination and hybridisation rewriting the relationship between things, transfiguring natural objects into the surreal. Giovanni Battista Piranesi, in creating a reality made up of figures from a past world of architecture, produces same vertigo as Bosch's surreal world, as both make the non-visible visible. This duality and transfiguration of meanings of the figures, which are formally and semantically hybridised, has been explored in some of the works by Maurizio Sacripanti, Franco Purini and Massimo Scolari, projecting images and figures which, emerging from a time gone by, wrest a new look at reality from the present. This text traces and investigates some forms of theoretical thought that have originated the representations of artists and architects who, through drawing, have established a communication model of the conditions of the time.