IMAGO

The Latin word imago – still very much alive today, as demonstrated by the several hundred thousand hits when entered in Google – generally means depiction, visage or figure but its semantic scope also includes the meaning of picture and image. In medical terminology it denotes hypochondria, in depth psychology it refers to the idealised mental image of someone, or someone’s behaviour, while in biology it means the final stage of an insect’s development, its emergence from the pupa, i.e. the completion of its metamorphosis. Arriving from imago to its most important aspect for us, pictorial depiction, it is important to establish that an image is a depiction of someone or something, perhaps even of someone or something that does not exist in concrete form, and that imago is the act of creation – the creation of an image – which might be linked to the reality we can see and experience and can come into being through
the process of a seeming separation from that reality, hence a complete pictorial metamorphosis. In its traditional meaning imago is a two-dimensional representation; however, modern imaging has reinterpreted and questioned the concept of plane and space so radically that the borders between these two spheres have become blurred. Imaging, or depiction, has by now been liberated from its previous constraints in regard to content, formal-material aspects and modes of representation, but how successfully this freedom is used is shown by what actually is seen today as important, total and authentic, i.e. what constitutes an imago in the noblest sense of the word.