The Solipsistic Palimpsest: tautologising absence and the power of an image to refer to nothing

An image's reference is constitutively ambiguous by dint of the fact that the image is itself discrete. Its ontological limitation – its definition – constitutes it as a thing in itself and, therefore, as radically separate from whatever it may be said to refer to.

This gap or elementary difference is even present in non-representational (abstract) art where the object exists simultaneously as its substance and its own image but the two modes of existence (as evidenced through reproduction) can never be wholly identified with each other.

An image, therefore, is in self-referential relation to itself as object as well as to any object it might reference by representation. The object is mute – even objects that are digitally constituted are mute to the point that their materiality is defined by a structural relationship physically describable without recourse to referencing the image or its content – this content being the referential field of the work itself.

If the image has phenomenological existence it is though referencing power – a power that includes the image itself but not the materiality that grounds it – the physical description of which is most comprehensively achieved without reference to the image as image (as referentiality).