Modernitat i classicisme en l'art filosòfic de Giorgio de Chirico

The essay shows how the modernity of Giorgio de Chirico's art – a modernity in the sense described by Theodor W. Adorno in Aesthetic Theory – consists precisely in how de Chirico summarizes traditional art, which for him is synonymous with classical art. In de Chirico's work, paradoxically, the traits that characterize traditional art are at the same time adopted and denied. In particular, the essay focuses on the painter’s Metaphysical period, where the elements of ruin, interruption and fracture become paramount and where the unreal breaks into reality in order to dismantle it. The form of de Chirico’s painting is a genuine testimony to the irredeemable fragmentation of reality. Thus, if the classical world is, par excellence, the place of the Symbol – the place where meaning emerges at its most densely significant – then in de Chirico such a world has finally become mute: hence that disconnection between signifier and meaning that gives de Chirico's form its irreducible enigmatic character: the awareness that meaning can only be evoked in the form of absence and loss.