The void as language: the ethical critique of lacunar aesthetics

Abstract

The essay proposes the concept of lacunar aesthetics as a critical-analytical category of contemporary art, characterized by practices that operate through absence, failure, silence, and interruption as ethical and political forms of expression. This aesthetic rejects the direct representation of limit-experiences, considering that their symbolization may lead to the trivialization or aestheticization of pain. Instead, it values the void as an intensified form of presence and resistance. This aesthetic is structured by an ethics of containment, which manifests in three main forms of emptiness: absence, omission, and excess. From this perspective, the article presents a critical view of dominant symbolic regimes, proposing the lacuna as both language and strategy of critical memory and resistance.