Towards a Deconstruction of Ilomorphism. Imago-Magia and Visionary Drawings. From Baroque Metonymy to Contemporary Polycentric Spaces

Abstract

This paper proposes a reinterpretation of drawing and artistic practice that goes beyond the traditional hylomorphic paradigm, which interprets creative activity as the formal imposition of an active subject upon a passive material. From an ontogenetic and relational perspective, it introduces the notion of synaptic drawing as an interpretive model that describes the creative process as an event of connection, emergence, and co-constitution among the author, the material, and the context. In dialogue with Bruno’s metaphysics of polycentricity, Michel Foucault’s hermeneutics of the subject, and Walter F. Otto’s anthropological theory, the text challenges the form/matter and active/passive dichotomies, highlighting how the work emerges from a dynamic process of interaction.
Through a theoretical exploration that weaves together philosophy, art history, and architectural theory, the text analyses perspectival devices as practices that generate subjectivity and meaning, from the crisis of linear perspective to the polycentric and unstable configurations of modernity and contemporaneity. Within this framework, visual and design examples –from the visionary architectures attributed to François de Nomé to the graphic experiments of Daniel Libeskind and the critical practices of Lebbeus Woods– demonstrate how space emerges as a relational field and the image is constituted in the tension between the visible and the invisible.
Synaptic drawing is thus understood as a practice that activates relationships, transforms the subject, and reconfigures reality. This gives rise to an aesthetic and epistemological paradigm in which the work takes shape as an event and an encounter, opening up to a polycentric and non-hierarchical conception of artistic practice, in which matter, author, and world mutually participate in the genesis of form.