Art is a symbolic language in which to recognise ourselves: in its forms we reveal the origin, the past that remains with us as we contemplate the present. We can see it as a dysfunction of time, perhaps as its retreat, because the original, the previous, is contained in the future, which is not linear. Whatever the art form, whatever the medium used, whether it is pigment, bronze, stone or a laser beam that formulates, in its different forms, human existence. Much of 20th-century philosophy having refuted metaphysics, one of the functions of art today is, on the basis of this rejection, to come up with a language that is transcendental in itself, like its own. This is the contradiction to be settled between the real and the sensed.