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Mimesis, Mimicry and the Taming of the Gaze:
On Painting’s Potential to Influence Reality
by Sotirios Bahtsetzis

Dimitris Tzamouranis paints, and paints representationally! Today, this sounds almost like an impertinence. Both the use of the medium of painting as well as the conscious choice of representational motifs seems to be a rather elitist, nearly regressive position compared with a mainly iconoclastic tradition that forms the basis of modern art. How can one be legitimized through the representational and visual imagery based on the identifiable when painting and above all illusionistic painting has more the status of a peripheral phenomenon in the art of the neo-avant-garde, in an art that is characterized by an “antimimetic affect”? 1 Under these rather or less recognized conditions, which have a tone-setting effect on art today, where is it now possible to position Tzamouranis’s concept of art? To address this question, what should first be sketched out is the historical development of this anti-mimetic affect. Since this implicitly contemporary “iconoclasm” is based on a very old discussion about the relationship of copy and imagination. As is generally known, this discussion began with the art-historical debate on mimesis; a term that Plato introduced within philosophical aesthetics quite early on. Plato’s famous-infamous term, which was elucidated in the tenth book of The Republic, is often seen a scandal in the history of philosophy because there the philosopher there allegedly called for a legal ban on art and any production of images. The Platonic ban on illusory forms and the imaginative production of visual fictions guarantees and defends the authority of the “true” image, which is ossified in its iconography and is determined by cultic and political functions. Plato’s ban on images was continued and intensified during the iconoclastic controversy in the Byzantine empire of the eighth and ninth centuries, one of the most passionate theological, aesthetic, and political debates in the church, which had then not yet been divided into Orthodox and Catholic dogmas. To an even greater extent than in the case of Plato—as concerned in the production and use of images—was the examination of profound metaphysical-theological questions connected with issues relating to concurrence of forms, similarity of entities, and imitation.2 Both in the case of Plato as well as in the case of the iconodules in the first Christian empire, the true image (icon in Byzantium and eikon in the work of Plato), compared with the false image (eidolon), guaranteed the legitimation of the theological doctrine and the politics based on this ontology. Then, with the advent of the Renaissance, a new politics of images was proclaimed. The spectator-oriented subjectification of pictorial representation— achieved through the techniques of linear perspective and the use of the camera obscura and the laterna magica—heralded the epoch of a modern worldview with regard to phenomena.3 The production of representational images within Athenian Classicism and the Florentine Renaissance provides the genealogical foundations for a modern, self-aware, pictorial representation, which found ontological certainty in a play of phenomena based on pure presence. Victor Stoichiţă’s elegantly worded statement on the iconoclasm of the sixteenth century fundamentally explains the most significant effects of all historical iconoclasms on art: “While Protestants were busy destroying images, Catholics were engaged in rediscovering the image’s powers of persuasion and value as propaganda.” 4 Interestingly, John Calvin’s praise of the “white wall” and Martin Luther’s understanding of art as Spiegelbilder, (mirror images) provide the conceptual arsenal for the further development of art as a contextual, self-referential discourse, in other words, as meta-painting. Representational-illusionistic painting could thus be ascribed to this tradition of a persuasive, pictorial rhetoric aiming at phenomena, which re-contextualizes pictoriality simply “as only art.” The drama of iconoclasm was, however, repeated in the twentieth century, a century that rejected the theater of appearances in representational painting in an altered form in order to establish a new theology of abstract symbols. Abstract Expressionism (primarily that of American artists) stood quite emblematically for this essential ontology of the image and was directed against the propangandistic powers of persuasion of the demonized—or said in a modern way, “non-autonomous”— Social Realism during the Cold War. It allowed, in a Platonic fashion, only a non-realist imitation at peace with itself in the sense of a representative, metaphysical symbol, which was legitimized as a metonymic reference to an essentially absent reality. Nonetheless, the rehabilitation of the indexical symbol in contrast to the iconic symbol in the twentieth century can be seen as the basis or stage on which the performance of the painter is executed and presented.5 The heroicizing of one’s own self-expression, of inner states, and the quasi-romantic substitution of a grounding certainty for the cosmos through the emphasizing of the genial subject or the transcendence of a painting of individual ecstasy are, however, ultimately camouflages for a modern and completely individualized theology, or an “ontotheology” of existence.6 This characteristically comes to be expressed with Jackson Pollock’s exclamation: “I am nature!” 7 Might the representational painting that operates through the illusionistic modes of representation that Dimitris Tzamouranis consciously employs then instead be understood as a return to an older tradition of pictorial representation, to a tradition that affirms the iconicity of images in that it defends the transformative power of their presence, and thus recognizes the position of the artist as a crafter of illusions and a manipulator of our mental images? How might an affirmative reply to this question influence our understanding of the world and of our own self? In order to describe the fundamental problem that such an understanding of creating images exposes, the ways and means, as well as the impact on presence of iconic images should be considered in greater depth. Might a pictorial representation that is always connected with the recognizable amount to a defense of the dichotomy of specification and imitation, archetype and likeness, original and copy, real presence and mere, intellectual idea? Or would the deliberate use of mimetic techniques instead inversely mean a deconstruction of these dichotomies, paraphrasing Jacques Derrida’s dictum, “there is nothing outside the iconic image”? The mimesis employed in Tzamouranis’s work, his art of imitation, can be interpreted as an affirmation of the simulacrum, a term that can function as a plausible devolution from the Greek expression “mimesis.” And in reality, in the work of Plato, as Lambert Wiesing has outlined, it is possible to differentiate the mimesis principle into “two types of the art of imitation,” a differentiation that is still lacking in The Republic but that is undertaken in the late Sophist dialogues.9 Mimesis eikastike, the art of making likenesses, is not only a production technique of absolute imitation but also a guarantee of the ontological correctness of what is represented. In contrast, mimesis phantastike, imaginative imitation, strives for innovations and thus allows for a persuasive play of phenomena that is subjective, contingent, and visible with the bare eye. A subjectifying, viewer- related perspective is, therefore, applied here, supplementing the pictorial to include a performative and simultaneously self-referential (art that reflects on art) dimension. This art bears witness to an anthropocentrism that overwhelms the viewer, in which the well-known statement of Protagoras—Plato’s philosophical archenemy—“anthropos metron,” “man is the measure of all things,” echoes. For this reason, it is a “deceptive image,” in Friedrich Schleiermacher’s translation—a rendering that is in fact not necessarily correct but analogous, which apparently conveys the essence of Plato’s viewpoint, which is propelled by pure ontology (and politics) and deprecates the visual imagination. “A simulacrum is the idea of an imitation that inevitably falsifies what it imitates and not only falsifies but, for Deleuze, directly inters the idea of an original and a truth of the original in the simulacrum.” 10 In Gilles Deleuze’s representational- critical approach, the anti-Platonic gesture of the simulacrum can actually signify the affirmation of a type of painting that is consciously utilized in an anti-essential manner. “So to reverse Platonism means to make the simulacra rise and to affirm their rights among icons and copies. … The simulacrum is not a degraded copy. It harbors a positive power which denies the original and the copy, the model and the reproduction.” 11 Does it, therefore, mean that the presence of an image affirms the existence of an image that moves outside of an essentialist understanding, and which, as a result, references metaphysics and favors the phenomenal world? Does the ascent of the simulacrum mean the revaluation of a “quasi-pagan” understanding of the image, which is wholly removed from the indexical theology of the referring symbol? At the same time, what exactly does phenomenal presence mean in this context? Emmanuel Alloa’s observations on the conjunctivist content of images are pioneering in this regard: images can generally represent interconnections for which it is not initially relevant whether they exist in fact or not. Nevertheless, particularly in the interpretation of images that rely on recognition, as is the case in representational painting, the logical error of confusing reality with actuality is often made. (The modern debate regarding the concept of mimesis is based on this misconception alone.) Nonetheless, it is less actuality than reality that is missing from images. “Images are conjunctivist to the extent that they signal conjunctions in which the question of whether they can be related to an empirical actual existence in an indicative mood at all remains open. Every image correspondingly consummates, in the words of Edmund Husserl, an ‘epocheÅL’ when it makes a structure of phenomena visible in its intrinsic stringency through bracketing its validity to exist.” 12 Deleuze’s observation thus becomes clearer. In order to be able to speak about images, one has to recognize their potentialities, their virtual content: images are only images because they might also be simulacra at the same time. What are these conjunctivist structures of phenomena that come to light in Tzamouranis’s simulacra? Let us then take a closer look at his oil paintings. If one would like to understand the essence of these images, a discussion of the way in which he produces them seems indispensable. On the often large-format paintings, the figures of people who generally come either from the artist’s immediate family or close circle of friends almost always appear. These figures seem to participate in a play of gestures, stances, gazes, and props in which it is not possible to identify precisely. The figures are often depicted as if they are part of a theatrically arranged or staged meeting of the individuals involved, thus completely in keeping with the “historia” of the art-historical treatises of the Renaissance. Encompassing this concept, which is borrowed from the rhetoric of antiquity, the pictorial representation is animate and shared by individuals situated in various types of affective states. The viewer is prompted to decode the nature of these figurative gestures and the symbolism of the costumes and diverse props. The Milanese Giovanni Paolo Lomazzo, perhaps the most ambitious art theoretician of the late sixteenth century, expressed this new image convention to the artists of his time with the call to take advantage of all the possible combinations of pictorial language, which can be subsumed under his concept of inventio. In the work of Tzamouranis, what is also concerned is pictorial invention, which is itself presented in the manner of what at first glance appears to be a history painting. In his three-part series Triumphzüge (Triumphal Procession, 2011/12) and particularly in the paintings Rebellion and Thanatos (2011/12), which were clearly inspired by Andrea Mantegna’s famous series of images The Triumphs of Caesar (created between 1486 and 1506) and concretely by paintings such as The Corselet Bearers or The Musicians, Tzamouranis adheres to a classical compositional scheme that exalts the pictorial-rhetorical persuasiveness of painterly invention. With his procession of plunder and trophies (statues, busts, inscriptions, armor, and weapons), which are presented on stands and carried by prisoners and soldiers, Mantegna creates a prototype for the design of triumphal processions, which Tzamouranis gladly brings up-to-date correspondingly and with reference to the events of today. His triumphal procession is a demonstration of young people, who present their own armor, weapons, and standards in the form of puppets, masks, and colorful clothing. Precisely this strategy of pictorial updating shows that Tzamouranis makes use not only of the conceptual means of Renaissance painting but also of the compositional strategies and production modes of another, later classical canon. It is to the merit of Svetlana Alpers to have discovered an innovation in image creation in the art of Rembrandt, the “theatrical model.” The pictorial representation of body language and movements in the art of Rembrandt as well as in that of his student Samuel van Hoogstraten can actually be traced back to theatrical performances in the painting studio. “It was a theater designed for the actor, not for the spectator, and was a model for the spectator less theater in the studio, where the artist was not a spectator, but a performer.” 13 In the course of image creation, theater was regularly practiced and thus promoted as visual art to rhetoric and poetry. In the Netherlands of the seventeenth century, painter and poet and/or playwright were sometimes combined in a single individual. Rembrandt’s greatness is not least a result of this specific mixture of art and life in which the highlighting of pictorially inventive mimicry, the performance-like element of modeling, “[plays] with the performative nature of modeling but also [reflects] on the enacted or elusive nature of a person so represented.” 14 What is decisive in this is how modeling inevitably coincided with role-playing. And Alpers summarizes: “It is not, then, as surprising as it may seem that a particular line of European painters whom we think of realists—VelaÅLzquez, Hogarth, Courbet, Manet, and, I would like to add, Rembrandt—have been fascinated by the playing of roles, be it on the part of models, sitters, or, by extension, professional actors.” 15 It might perhaps be superfluous to mention the fact that precisely the painters that Alpers mentions are among Tzamouranis’s art-historical role models. The role-playing of Victorine Meurent as a bullfighter, as Olympia, or as herself but in the company of a parrot, which according to the iconographic tradition stands for the imitatio, meet in Manet’s art with VelaÅLzquez’s series of portraits of the jesters and dwarves that served in the Spanish court, and with Antoine Watteau’s Gilles in order to emphasize the ambiguity and even the questionable nature of social roles, and their manifestations and behaviors. But is it not astonishing that the greatest degree of realism in painting is achieved specifically in the unselfconscious display of role-playing, in the use of the theatrical model? Surprisingly, the individuals depicted on Tzamouranis’s paintings, who model for the artist according to this old method of a studio painting of a Rembrandt, are also actors in fictive, everyday scenes that develop in the painter’s studio as well as on their own, but which are also supplemented to include an imaginative dimension. Thus, for instance, in Ausgang (Exit, 2012) in which three female figures equipped with flashlights illuminate each other. Tzamouranis’s method of working often has onomatopoetic characteristics: the name of one of the women depicted is Ariadne, and she thus provides the basis for a pictorial composition that brings up-to-date the myth of the Cretan princess of the same name, the daughter of PasiphaeÅN (the “wide-shining”) and, through her, granddaughter of the sun god Helios. Thanks to Ariadne’s luminous thread, Theseus found his way out of the labyrinth. But would Theseus’s fate have been if the hero had been required to choose between the three Ariadne’s at a dark intersection? The answer is left up to each person who views the oil painting. For every Greek who grew up with Homer, Hesiod, and Ovid, proper names have a significant meaning in a literal sense; they each have their own story. The three figures depicted in the painting Ausgang are all friends of the artist; they can, however, at the same time embody the Three Graces, or the three goddesses of fate (the Moirai of Greek or the Fates of Roman antiquity). It is precisely this play of transferring roles, the palimpsest of layers of meaning, which is able to trigger sensual sensations, emotions, and spiritual insights in the viewer beyond the clear representation of a narrative evoked through meticulous pictorial rhetoric. In Tzamouranis’s art, the play of mimicry and readjustment even becomes the subject of the image. In Panos Pretending to Be Vincenzo Peruggia (2011), one sees a young man posing on a sofa. He hides a painting that is nothing less than Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa on the floor under the sofa. The mimicry is twofold: once as the role-playing of a person who pretends to be someone else, and a second time as the insertion of an existing image into the actual painting in the form of a pictorial citation. As is generally known, the decorative painter and occasional crook Vincenzo Peruggia stole the Mona Lisa from the Louvre in 1911 and kept the painting in his accommodations in Paris, and namely hidden under his bed, for two years. Perrugia even developed an obsessive, eroticizing relationship to the most famous lady in art history, who had already become the epitome of museum, cultural voyeurism prior to his time. The representation of a painting in the painting, which can be seen as “a procedure focusing on meta-artistic discourse,” 16 is significant in this. Since Mona Lisa represents the reverse side of the painterly play with imitation as a result of the fact that the detective-like efforts of art historians to identify the actual model have reached thriller-like dimensions. The play with identity is continued even in the ambiguity of the gender of the model: is the merchant’s wife Lisa del Giocondo or Leonardo’s lover Andrea Salaino depicted here? The play of references and symbol-laden transpositions also pertains to the artist’s own biography. In Tzamouranis’s SelbstportraÅNt (Self-portrait, 2011), one sees the face of the artist looking directly at the viewer while being touched gently by the artificial hand of a shop window dummy. This is an allusion to at least two topoi of art history: the theme of the “docta manus” or the “manus ingeniosa” is addressed in the self-portrait of the thinking painter’s hand, the instrument of creation encounters the myth of the artist of Pygmalion and Galatea in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, in which the poet, as is known, reports on the inspiriting of a female figure carved from ivory, brought to life by Pygmalion’s love. Nevertheless, wanting to uncover the art-historical soundness of Tzamouranis’s picture conception does not mean undermining the deliberate artificiality and contemporary ambiguity of his pictorial language. Tzamouranis’s Galatea, despite having been brought to life, does not strive to conceal her artificiality. Even if the painter styles himself as a new Pygmalion, he also shows himself not least as a crafter of transformations, as a master of artifices, and as an artistic conjurer—in this regard, one might also think of his earlier self-portrait with the all too eloquent title Pretending to Be Houdini (2005). The reference to magic that is metaphorically employed here should, however, be understood in a literal sense and elucidated within the art-historical context. In any case, until the Renaissance, painting was seen as part of a science of manipulating imaginary images (phantasms) and of imagination, which ranged from mnemonics and prophecy (mantic) to the hermetic manipulation of the phantasmagoric Eros, of magic in general. It is not a coincidence that the most prominent representative of the Florentine aesthetic, the Neo-Platonist Marsilio Ficino, understood Platonism within the context of the theurgy, demonic magic, and astrological magic of a Proclus, Porphyry, and Iamblichus.17 According to Ficino’s “empirical psychology,” external images penetrate the pneumatic interior of human beings through two related intellectual activities, the sense of sight and Eros. Nevertheless, these are not only attributes of the divine enthusiasm of the poet (enthusiasm refers to the sentence “en tō theō,” thus “to be in god”) but also those of an expert in manipulation, of a magician. The widespread belief in the evil eye (jettattura), whose cause is abnormal desire, would be proof of this. As a result, the sublime Florentine portraits of beautiful women and pretty youths can be assigned not only to the Apollonian but also occasionally to the Faustian face of art. Just as mnemonic represented a link between Eros and magic, painting, which was based on this system of rules, was also supposed to be understood as a technique for manipulating imaginary images. In this sense and analogous to the magical effect of harmful spells initiated through eye contact (jettattura or baskania in Greek) or love darts, gazes that come from paintings can have devastating effects for those to whom they are addressed. (The use of the arrow motif in the scene of the blinding of the judge on one of Mantegna’s frescoes allegorizes not only the theory of sight in the Renaissance but can also be introduced as eloquent evidence for the existence of this old belief.18 ) A certain fascination that quite clearly aims at desire underlies images and gazes. (The word fascination comes from enchantment and/or bewitchment (fascinatio), which provides the etymological basis of the word fascinum, the apotropaic, phallus-like amulet of the Romans utilized primarily against the evil eye. Apparently, the objet petit a in connection with phallus, the chiasmus of gazes, and desire was discovered long before Jacques Lacan.) In the case that the Renaissance treatises on techniques for manipulating imaginary images remain incomprehensible for our philosophical taste of today, we can attempt to interpret them—now finally stripped of any reference to magic— in a contemporary manner, namely from the perspective of the aesthetics of perception. Images do not see but they can gaze at us. The manipulation of images already described is based entirely on the specific dialectic of the nature of gazes, which was first highlighted theoretically by Jean-Paul Sartre. “His starting point is not looking as an activity that originates from the subject but rather being-looked-at, which happens to the subject by means of another.” 19 Yet as Lacan demonstrated, this other does not need to be a person who is actually present. The other is situated not only in the domain of the interpersonal but also in the realm of the inanimate. Hans Belting called this innate (and learnable) ability of our bodies to discover life in inanimate images—clearly recognizing the magic charging of this word—“animation.” 20 Although we know that the destruction of a photograph of a person who has been photographed does not cause any physical harm, we would at least hesitate to poke holes in the eyes in this photograph. If a beloved individual were concerned, such an act would be virtually unthinkable. The subjectivizing chiasmus of gazes is best illustrated by the myth of Medusa. The petrifying head of the Gorgon—the Gorgoneion was often depicted on shields, amulets, and gravestones in Ancient Greece due to its apotropaic magic— allegorizes the confinement from which, in the words of Belting, the image’s “animation potential” arises; it simultaneously represents a metaphor for the power of painting to intercept the image’s visual contact directed at the observing subject and to reflect it as a mirror image. It is not necessary to emphasize the fact that what is concerned is a motif that often appears in Tzamouranis’s iconography. It is indeed often combined with a further allegory in painting, that of the curtain. Every painting consequently proves to be a taming of the gaze, an immobilization of the viewer. When Maurice Merleau-Ponty highlights the inversion of gazes with reference to something that painters often express, the fact that things look at them, he outlines how painting—for him an allegory for philosophy—establishes the paradox of becoming-manifest.21 In that we are no longer the subject of seeing but rather the object of being-looked-at. For Sybille KraÅNmer, it is this ongoing possibility to be gazed at, this dialectic of gazes, “that explains the irreducible fact of our sociality” and thus comprises “power and powerlessness, domination and submission.” 22 Nonetheless, the danger for us presently does not arise from the enchantment of painting but instead from the narcotic effects of the high-tech mass media of the spectacle. The treatises of the Renaissance thus not only prove to be an archeological starting point for modern psychological and sociological sciences but at the same time also provide fundamental tools for the powerful industries of the imaginary, which have constantly and regularly colonized both our powers of imagination as well as the collective memory—the realm of the imaginary in the twentieth century. The deletion of inner images that may also be uncanny or unsettling and the subsequent reflections that influence our frameworks for action lead to the current culture of repeated forgetting, to the contemporary pornography of the simulacrum played down in the art world, in the press, in politics, in war. Now, Plato seems right in being unwilling. If art is supposed to be “mimesis mimeseos,” then it seems that the real wants to appear exclusively in the “imitation of imitation.” And the Surrealists also seem to be right: only the real beyond the real, or the surreal is capable of bringing what is essential to light. Painting is then a second nature; since it imitates this, it surpasses it. This is the paradox of mimesis. According to the well-known Aristotelian definition of tragedy from the Poetics, mimesis operates in conjunction with catharsis, and as Philippe Lacoue- Labarthe has shown, the term catharsis not only means purging, thus the excretion of harmful emotions, but should also be understood as a synonym for the renowned Aufhebung (sublation) of the Hegelian dialectic. (The word comes from kathairein, whereby purifying is not its first meaning but rather abolishing, terminating, destroying.) Mimesis would then to be understood as an operator of an abolishing of contingent reality. Painting is a theatrical mimicry that suspends the arbitrary play of phenomena by reconstructing it. In this sense, an ethical provision is inherent in the potential of images to influence reality, which originates in the mimetic arts. For Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, mimesis is the absolute condition for purifying catharsis, for the “the successful sublimation of negative feelings, which are nullified in their negativity and which are perpetuated in their intensity through artistic mimesis in general,” which can be summarized in the declaration that “the purifying of Greece lies in the negation of its negativity. It is concentrated and come to light in the phrase: the theater of the Greeks was not [pure] theater.” 23 For Mehdi Belhaj Kacem, Lacou- Labarthe’s excellent insights pave the way for a further meditation on the nature of cathartic negation in art, which can accordingly only be explained as part of a general “mimetology.” In Aristotle’s defense of mimesis, what is attested to is not only the fact that there would be no abreaction and no possibility of expression without art, but much more the fact that the mimetic-cathartic effect of art primarily has a pedagogical, in other words, a political-subjectifying function. Mimesis might then be another term for explaining the affective process of transmission that arises from acts of looking, which is often described in the terminology of “aesthetic contagion.” 24 It is to the credit of Friedrich Nietzsche to have been the first to highlight art’s contagious modalities of transmission, that unintended and unconscious catharsis that takes effect in observing. The human being as a zoon politikon, as a political being, is at first a zoon mimetikotaton, a living being, which, according to Aristotle, is most capable of imitation as a result of its nature. At the same time, the human being is a zoon pathetikon, a being suspended in the mirror of the other and infected by his or her charged gaze. A type of painting that operates according to these rules can liberate us from the spell of the consciousness-altering inflation of images that arises from the diverse pictorial practices of ideological, religious, and political propaganda. It resists the subtle pictorial regime of the movement of capital, which is able to exist continuously in the form of the spectacle. It is not a coincidence that one of Tzamouranis’s most important works, his Melancholia (2012), borrows heavily from the tradition of presenting religious art, thus from the overwhelming pictorial rhetoric of altar retables. Although the theological dimension of this modern painting, which is divided into sections and include side panels that are attached the large central panel (polyptych) is obviously present in Tzamouranis’s iconography, here, it is, nonetheless, presented in a form devoid of the religious, in a perhaps pagan form. In the middle panel, where one would usually expect a crucifixion, or an entombment, or a Last Judgment scene, one instead sees a group of young people lying on the floor, calling to mind an hour of rest in a room in a shared apartment. The young couple positioned in the center of the image, which are hugging one other while sleeping and flanked by friends (depicted are Elektra, the daughter of the painter, and her friend Julius) embodies the more sublime form of the innocent, unconditional agape centered on others, which as inclusive, communal love transcends exclusive love based on partnership. Does Tzamouranis’s profane devotional image speak of a social utopia or of a fact that is always realized in the presence of lovers, which transcribes the metaphysical seeming Pauline “agape” for the people of today? The image radiates a pure humanism. Its counterpart would be the painting Die Nacht (The Night, 2010), in which a similar scene with the same cast of individuals takes place. Here, the female protagonist awakes waiting (and with her all of us) for the moment of fulfillment. It is a thus natural to mention the fact that this painting and even Tzamouranis’s work in its entirety is to be understood as a re-questioning of the classical link between the imagery of light and the idea of enlightened thinking, therefore, the occidental ontology of light that fundamentally defines our thinking and was called “helio-centrism” by Derrida. On the outer wing panels of Melancholia, full moon and new moon landscape sceneries are depicted opposite one another. Rays of light, luminaries, mirrors, eyes, and masks appear so often in Tzamouranis’s work in order to show the visibility-related foundations of the world, intellect, and insight in European thought. It is significant that the upper panels of the polyptych, in contrast to the painting Die Nacht, in which initially a rather unorthodox perspective of a view from above of a space whose perspective cannot be fixated is presented. This unusual perspective resembles an autonomization of space that simultaneously signifies a revealing of means particular to painting. Tzamouranis seems to want to communicate to us that despite the illusionism that he consciously employs and the persuasive dynamic of his art, painting always remains related to the consummate mastery of what is connected to handcraft, and should thus always be understood as a techne. Likewise, paintings such as Soika und Eva (2009), in which color defines the surface of the painting in an aggressive and explosion-like manner—one thinks of a “Pieta` of color”—strive to bring the autonomization of the coloring to the fore. The broad range of content in the polyptych (“poly-ptych” literally means many-faceted) obviously cannot be examined in-depth within the framework of this short presentation. Because apparently, this wall of monumental size comments on the conventions of painting since it became secularized in the eighteenth century, as the portrait in the form of the portable panel picture, and often against the efforts of painters to reverse this trend, became nearly synonymous with the nature of painting. Nevertheless, Tzamouranis’s mimetology does not strive to be an ennoblement of the individualized and still glorified ego, which would all too gladly be nourished by the modern industry of the spectacle. Our alleged immunity to images in the age of their technical reproducibility (oh, that’s only a picture!) turns out to be merely an illusion that wants to conceal the potential of the gaze to influence reality. United in such an art (thus techne is understood as the methodical achievement of a goal) is the desire to liberate human beings from the darkness of the cave-like dwelling in Plato’s well-known allegory of the cave from The Republic and the Christian vision of the Revelation to John in which “the end of the alternation of day and night and the rule of eternal light” is prophesied. And as the philosopher Giorgio Agamben has observed, Christian belief is present in a hereafter flooded with light in various, social utopias of liberation: thus, for instance, in the text of the German version of L’ Internationale by Emil Luckhardt, in which it is also prophesied that “the sun will shine without respite.” Yet for those who do not believe in something outside of the text (be it the transcendent sun of absolute truth, that light-bringing hereafter of religion, or the lightning-like revolution, which is always set in the future), this means consciously living in the illusory nature of the world creating moments of a transitive becoming, and affirming them through an art of presense, therefore through an immanent pictoriality of the simulacrum. Tzamouranis’s heroes are not acting individuals but rather melancholic witnesses to a world that has become unthinkable; unthinkable because it has long since shown itself to be unbearable in its immense injustice and everyday banality. Nevertheless, they are neither passive nor resigned. They are heroes of a contemporary paganism who enjoy their life as a simulacrum in the immanence of this world. One can gladly call such a strategy melancholic, since as every art and world literature, the history of art, and the multitude of literary and artistic greats considered to be melancholy individuals prove, it can ultimately only come into its own as such.

1 Karl-Heinz Ott, Die vielen Abschiede von der Mimesis (Stuttgart, 2010), p. 9.
2 Marie-JoseÅL Mondzain, Image, Icon, Economy: The Byzantine Origins of the Contemporary
Imaginary (Stanford, 2004).
3 Friedrich Kittler, Optical Media (Cambridge, 2010).
4 Victor Ieronim Stoichiţă, The Self-Aware Image: An Insight into Early Modern Meta-Painting
(Cambridge, 1997), p. 89.
5 The development of the art of the twentieth century can be seen as a movement that
leads away from “mimesis” and toward “semiosis,” or according to the terminology of
today, away from iconicity and toward the indexicality of the image. Ludger Schwarte (ed.),
Bild-Performanz (Munich, 2011), p. 14.
6 Jacques Derrida, “The Ends of Man,” in: the same, Margins of Philosophy (Chicago, 1984).
7 Robert Rosenblum, Modern Painting and the Northern Romantic Tradition: Friedrich to
Rothko (London, 1975).
8 Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology (Baltimore, 1997), p. 163: “There is nothing outside the
text.”
9 Lambert Wiesing, Artificial Presence: Philosophical Studies in Image Theory, trans. Nils F.
Schott (Stanford, 2010), pp. 102–121; Plato, Sophist, 235d.
10 Mehdi Belhaj Kacem, InaÅNsthetik und Mimesis (Berlin, 2011), p. 21.
11 Gilles Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, (New York, 1990), p. 262.
12 Emmanuel Alloa, “Darstellen, was sich in der Darstellung allererst herstellt: Bildperformanz
und Sichtbarmachung,” in: Schwarte 2011 (see note 5), p. 53.
13 Svetlana Alpers, Rembrandt’s Enterprise: The Studio and the Market (Chicago, 1988), p. 43.
14 Ibid., p. 56.
15 Ibid., pp. 56–7.
16 Stoichiţă 1998 (see note 4), p. 166.
17 Ioan P. Culianu, Eros and Magic in the Renaissance, trans. Margaret Cook (Frankfurt am
Main, 2001), p. 54.
18 See Hans Belting, Florence and Baghdad: Renaissance Art and Arab Science, trans. Deborah
Lucas Schneider (Cambridge, MA, 2011), p. 218.
19 Sybille KraÅNmer, “Gibt es eine Performanz des Bildlichen? Reflexionen über Blickakte,” in:
Schwarte 2011 (see note 5), p. 69.
20 Hans Belting, “Zur Ikonologie des Blicks,” in: Christoph Wulf, JoÅNrg Zirfas (eds.), Ikonologie
des Performativen (Munich, 2005), p. 50.
21 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, L’oeil et l’esprit (Paris, 1964), p. 31.
22 KraÅNmer 2011 (see note 20), p. 69.
23 Kacem 2011 (see note 10), p. 61, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Poetik der Geschichte (Berlin,
2004), p. 100.
24 Mirjam Schaub et al (ed.), Ansteckung: Zur KoÅNrperlichkeit eines aÅNsthetischen Prinzips,
(Munich, 2005).