Quando a Imagem Se Dá: Ídolo, Ícone e o Excesso da Pintura When the Image Is Given: Idol, Icon, and the Excess in Painting

The notions of idol and icon, historically shaped at the intersection of theology, culture, and philosophy, acquire a specific status within the phenomenology of givenness as particular modes of receiving the phenomenal appearing of the world. From the perspective of Jean-Luc Marion, these categories – along with flesh and historical event – are understood as saturated phenomena, expressing the central paradoxes of givenness. This article aims to investigate such paradoxes in light of the phenomenology of givenness and to explore their possible connections with the visual language of painting. The objective is to outline new hermeneutical parameters capable of sustaining a phenomenological description of the pictorial image as a gift that imposes itself through its own givenness. The experience of painting, conceived as an encounter of gazes – between the self and the other – is thus reborn as a phenomenon of excessive visibility, traversed by the invisibility inherent in the act of giving.