oil on canvas, 60x90 cm

About the painting

Metaphysics begins where the obvious ends. It arises not as a system of answers, but as a unique intensity of questioning directed toward what lies beyond physical experience. Its subject is not things, but the conditions for the possibility of things; not phenomena, but what allows them to appear. Metaphysics attempts to speak of the unrepresentable, to think the unthinkable, to name the nameless.
Historically, metaphysics was born from a simple yet radical gesture: a shift of gaze away from the diversity of beings toward the very fact of existence. Why is there something rather than nothing? This question, formulated by Leibniz but already echoing in the first Greek philosophers, ruptures the everyday perception of the world as a given; it renders the givenness itself problematic. The question is not what the world is, but why it exists at all. It is a questioning of the foundation, the first principle, the ground—what Aristotle called "first philosophy."
Metaphysics created the categories without which we cannot think ourselves or the world: being, essence, existence, substance, cause, potentiality, actuality. These concepts are not reflections of things, but tools for navigating a reality that lies beyond things.
Perhaps the key to understanding metaphysics lies not in its answers, but in the experience that gives birth to it. This is the experience of wonder before the fact of the world's existence (as Ludwig Wittgenstein saw it: "Not how the world is, is the mystical, but that it is"); an existential shock; the feeling of the strangeness of being, which Gabriel Marcel called a "mystery."