Vernisaj The Mirror Stage

The artistic project The Mirror Stage is part of a research process that began six years ago, along with the development of doctoral studies at the National University of Arts in Bucharest.

Based on the studies of Jacques Lacan, Didier Anzieu, Giorgio Agamben and Emanuele Coccia, the thesis The Clothing Ego, publicly defended on November 1, 2025, investigates the cultural, psychological and, especially, aesthetic effects of the mirror on the human subject.

Lacan’s theory of the “mirror stage” was inspired by the earlier works of psychologist Henri Wallon, but was constantly criticized by Norman N. Holland and Raymond Tallis. The recognition of the face in the mirror, whether it occurs at six or eighteen months, represents a paradigmatic model of what Lacan called the “imaginary register”. Throughout his career, Lacan continued to refine his theory, until, around the 1950s, it became abstract enough that the “mirror” functioned more as a metaphor for observed behavior than as a literal device.

The dialectical revolution of nickel-plated surfaces and mirrors—flat, concave, or convex, in all their shapes and sizes—that expose and overexpose the image of reality, but especially the image of oneself, only serves to accentuate the permanent tension between gaze and reflection, between what is offered as an image and what is internalized as identity. Nickel-plated surfaces thus become spaces for negotiating the self, where the subject seeks, expands, recognizes, and, at the same time, loses himself in the multiplication of his own projections.

In this game of reflection, reality is no longer simply rendered, but distorted, amplified and reconfigured, and the image of one’s own person ceases to be a stable reference point, transforming itself into a fragile construct, always dependent on angle, light and distance. Because “this is, perhaps, the little big secret that mirrors have kept for centuries: they teach us that any image – the sensible as such – is the existence of a form outside its place. Any form and any thing that ends up existing outside its place becomes an image.” (Emanuele Coccia, The Sensitive Life, p. 30).

In this spectacle of reflections and consumption, maintained with remarkable efficiency by the beauty industry and what could be called a class of iatromancers of style, a secular religion of hypervisibility is established. This makes possible a colonization of the subject that no longer operates through direct constraint, but through aesthetic seduction and continuous self-exposure. We are thus faced with a form of aesthetic domination that can be described as a true “visual terrorism”, which imposes a discipline of visibility, with a view to total domination: “Those who make themselves visible are the ruled, not the rulers. Disciplinary power makes itself invisible, while it imposes permanent visibility on those who are subject to it. In order to ensure access to power, the subjugated are exposed in the spotlight. Being seen continuously keeps the disciplinary individual subjugated” (Byung-Chul Han, Topology of Violence, p.114). In this framework, the exposed individuals use the clothing self – in its extended and hyper-signified form – as a tool to obtain a surplus of visibility. However, this strategy only produces an illusion of power: an inverted power, specific to those who become aesthetically predictable and, precisely because of this, easier to integrate into the mechanisms of symbolic control. The seen employ the clothing Self, in its expanded form, to achieve even greater visibility.

In this theoretical climate, The Mirror Stage exhibition extends, in an intimate and caricatured manner, the effect of multiplication and glorification of one’s own image, as well as of a clothing Self that aspires to become our very idea of ​​the Image – a space that exposes an intermediate nature, a rhizomatic exile.