Toward a Contemporary Mimesis

Theo Chronis (2025)

Mimesis is no longer a given. It is a contested term, sedimented with centuries of philosophical tension. Plato feared it. Aristotle gave it function. The Renaissance canonized it. Modernism rejected it. And yet, it persists: as method, as instinct, as demand. In my work, mimesis survives, but in altered form. It is no longer about likeness. It is about dislocation. Interruption. Fracture.

I don’t paint to depict. I paint to confront. I work not with the image as window, but as membrane, a surface that resists transparency. What interests me is not the ability of art to show the world, but its ability to show the act of seeing. Mimesis becomes a site of pressure: between perception and projection, between the viewer and what the image refuses to resolve.

This approach is both formal and conceptual. Visually, my work often stages a boundary condition, between figuration and abstraction, clarity and distortion, digital and tactile. A human torso rendered with anatomical precision emerges from a ground of gestural noise. A classical profile fractures into synthetic grain. In some cases, the body disappears altogether, leaving only a trace: a fold, a void, a ghost. I construct images that hover between recognition and loss. That hesitation is the space I care about.

I call this a contemporary mimesis; Not because it adopts the technologies of the present (though it does), but because it engages the perceptual condition of now. We live in an image-saturated environment. Every platform, every screen, demands immediate legibility. The algorithm rewards the image that declares itself instantly and fully. My practice pushes against that. I want to make images that delay, that cannot be consumed at a glance, that resist algorithmic time.

In this sense, my mimesis is not only aesthetic but critical. It is suspicious of the smoothness of digital representation. It acknowledges the allure of realism but does not accept it as an endpoint. If I use photorealistic detail, it is only to subvert it, to question what it means to see something clearly, and what is excluded when we do.

This is where ambiguity enters. Ambiguity is not a defect. It is the strategy. An ambiguous form does not withhold meaning, it multiplies it. The eye tries to resolve, the mind tries to fix. But the image slips. What remains is not interpretation, but involvement. The viewer becomes implicated in the construction of meaning. Mimesis here is relational. It is the image as psychological interface.

Much of this comes from a long-standing engagement with perceptual philosophy and phenomenology. Merleau-Ponty’s idea of flesh -that the seer and the seen share the same substance- resonates strongly. As does Didi-Huberman’s proposition that images are not stable objects but sites of conflict, of temporality, of trauma. In my work, the image is not a container but an event. Not a fixed representation, but a field of forces.

This conceptual ground informs my technical process. I use a deliberately hybrid methodology: drawing, oil painting, AI generation, 3D modeling, sculpture. Sometimes in sequence, sometimes simultaneously. A work may begin as a hand sketch, be passed through a GAN trained on classical statuary, re-entered into a 3D modeling pipeline, and then materialized again through traditional media. Each transition introduces distortion. A rupture in fidelity, but a gain in resonance.

New projects like Corpus Interruptum (currently in development) embody this logic fully. In that series, I start with AI-generated fragments of human bodies -not whole figures, but torsos, limbs, anatomical ruins. They are intentionally incomplete, their classical proportions corrupted by machine hallucination. I treat these fragments as archaeological finds from a future that never existed. I re-inscribe them through paint or 3D print, often at scale, giving them weight, patina, false provenance. The project asks: What happens when machines become our archaeologists? What kind of history do they recover ...or invent?

Here, mimesis becomes a circular game. The machine imitates the human. I imitate the machine. The final object is neither original nor copy. It is a synthesis and a fiction. But one that carries the authority of material presence, the aura of the artifact. It is both familiar and wrong. It demands not belief, but doubt.

This intersects with another core concern: the image as a carrier of human projection. We don’t look at art innocently. We bring to it our myths, traumas, memories. In works that stage partial bodies or dismembered forms, I’m not interested in violence per se, but in the psychic work of completion. When a body is missing a face, the viewer supplies one. When the gesture is incomplete, it echoes in their own flesh. This feedback loop, between the ambiguous image and the projecting psyche is where the real content resides.

I sometimes refer to my process as slow seeing. Not in the romantic sense of patience or depth, but as a deliberate impedance. I want to slow the eye down, to frustrate its shortcuts, to disable the automatic act of labeling. Especially in the context of digital media, where images are optimized for speed and impact, this is a resistance strategy. It reclaims space for ambiguity, for tension, for unresolved sensation.

My background in 3D visualization -over a decade of making images that persuade, explain, sell- informs this too. There, the goal was clarity, legibility, control. Here, I want to unlearn that. To let the image misbehave. To allow the accident, the failure, the ghost in the machine.

Ultimately, my engagement with mimesis is not nostalgic. I do not long for a return to the real. Nor am I seduced by simulation. What I seek is a third space where the image is not a representation of reality, nor a denial of it, but a challenge to how reality is seen and structured. The image as a site where belief falters, where seeing becomes thinking.

This is not always comfortable. Some of my works provoke confusion. Others are dismissed as obscure. But I believe in the necessity of that discomfort. It is part of the ethic of mimesis: not to replicate the world, but to confront us with how we construct it. And perhaps, in that confrontation, to make us a little less sure of our own vision.