The originals do not exist

Jorge Léautaud, student of the Degree in Philosophy, Politics and Economics (PPE), of the
School of Philosophy and Letters, invites us to look at art from a different perspective. 

In the office of my grandfather's house, vaguely tinged with an air of carefree secrecy, like the character of a solemn office, hang two completely different twin pictures on adjacent walls. The curious thing about their similarity and oxymoron is not so much the image itself - the first sample a large half-open door from left to right, probably of carved spruce judging by the tone of the wood, while the second shows the reverse of the same, but with the opening shown in reverse - but the peculiar connection between the two paintings, courtesy of the finding of one of my sisters, the younger one.

Looking at the drawing, if we were to peep through the slit offered by the beam of light of one of the doors, say of the painting issue one, like little children, we would appreciate the interior, read the room where it hangs, of the painting issue two. This, in principle, indicates that what is observed through one door shows the outside of the other. This finding, the ontology of which subject wormhole one might speculate would leave more than one person's mouth hanging open, is not at all to our benefit, inasmuch as the one who acquired the paintings, read my grandfather, has been dead for several years now and has left no subject of information regarding the nature of the canvases.

So we asked ourselves four questions: (1) What is the purpose of both paintings? (2) How exposed would we be to communicate their existence? (3) Would our grandfather have statement, in turn, told anyone else? And, (4) if so, would this have had anything to do with his sudden death? In terms of purposes or various utilities, we have imagined the following possibilities: a rather progressive elaboration of the children's game Hide and Seek, a new gestural and pictorial communication system for the home, and even a simple but subtle toolkit for spying on our relatives in the privacy of their homes.

Given the latter, we imagine, for a second, that at least one of the many paintings that exist around the world goes home with this hidden feature, and since we don't want to name human misfortunes, we just laugh, imagining that every painting purchased has its twin counterpart somewhere in the world serving as a rear-view mirror. How many people will be unaware of this? And better still: How many will sense, in some small part of their being, that they may be constantly being watched, either by another miserable art buyer, like themselves, cornered in their home, innocently certain that they are the owner of an original? Finally, however much we may hypothesise, the space-time coincidence of the two paintings is real. It is not so much their existence as the manner in which they were obtained that disturbs us.

What damn misfortune must have befallen our grandfather that he managed to reveal the secret and obtain both sides of the same work? Without much fuss, my sisters and I are content to be the only ones aware of this tremendous family secret, although I sometimes suspect that they have known about this whole painting business long before I did, and so they are just playing with me, making me believe that I have some part to play in their peculiar machinations.
 

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