This research constructs and analyses a symbiosis of ideas that belong to the contemporary and modern context of Western art history, especially to painting’s tradition, with an early pan-Islamic mode of thinking. What this research proposes is essentially a new way of looking and an undoing of given frameworks.

The arabesque, more as an ‘idea’ or mode than a style or form, is the structuring principle and generative motor of this thesis. The thesis is an arabesque and is not only about the arabesque as visual motif or figure of thought. As a design-oriented structuring principle, the arabesque is a double, paradoxical device that enables a play between oblique and transparent things, between what can be said or known and what cannot be said, what remains unknown. The arabesque as a figure of thought sets out a play of plastic and graphic imminence.  In this thesis, the relation between theory and art, research and practice is at stake.  

The tension between representation and presentation, between symbolic, iconographic or legible meaning and a-signifying, pre-linguistic or ornamental meaning is the heart of understanding the image and forms one of the central axes of this thesis, which investigates from different perspectives (art historical, philosophical and cultural) the infinite rapport between the image and the ornamental. The image is here understood as a mode of being.

The route taken is one of conceptual risk, of invention and the fantastic. This project ventures into a process of ornamentalization and conceptual plasticity that leads to the formation of metamorphic knots. Such knots, act like sense-metastases that infect dichotomies like – theory and artwork, high art and low art, research and practice, writing and image, image and body, image and bodybuilding practices, body-mind, etc. In venturing in this radical space, this thesis questions, also and precisely, this very immersion into simultaneous heterogeneous registers and levels of ideas. A modified traditional hypothetical-deductive model is inducted: this thesis explores a hypothesis, not of explanation, but of inventive production, of the fabrication of a fantasmatic object, of conceptual and sensible production as fiction and fantasy. Thus method itself is addressed as something to be found – and not as something already given or pre-established.