Kristijona Čerapaitė

The special issue of Relevant Tomorrow, titled Monadological Landscapes: Reflections of Leibniz’s Theory in Philosophy and Painting, is dedicated to exploring the intersections between visual art (painting) and philosophy. The issue builds on the scholarly symposium Monadological Landscapes: Reflections of Leibniz’s Theory in Philosophy and Painting, held on March 14, 2024 at the Martynas Mažvydas National Library of Lithuania, organized by the Institute of Philosophy of the Faculty of Philosophy of Vilnius University. Using the work of Henrikas Čerapas as a focal point, the event sought to link philosophical and art-historical perspectives and to foster an interdisciplinary dialogue between metaphysics and visual art, idea and image, and thought and perception. The central question of the issue is whether—and if so, how—Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz’s monadology could be understood as a metaphor for pictorial structure. Leibniz’s concept of the monad, expressing the operational principles of fundamental elements of reality, allows artwork to be understood as visual monads. The issue invites to reevaluate the relationship between artwork and reality, seeing the artistic surface as a mode of cognition, and philosophical thought as a visual structure, thereby opening a space where philosophy becomes visible and the painting transforms into a distinctive form of thought. Monadological landscapes thus serve as a metaphor for the multiplicity of perspectives and the shifting relationship between the whole and its parts, while painting becomes a means for developing philosophical reflection and the visualization of abstract structures of reality.

This article proposes to look at artwork as visual externalisation of monads, thus establishing a profound link between the metaphysical and aesthetic dimensions of Leibniz’s philosophy. By framing the paintings of Henrikas Čerapas as an extension of Leibnizian metaphysics, the article explores the functioning of artwork not merely as representation but as integral component of nature. Čerapas’s paintings disclose an underlying system of internal relations that structure the body of work, thereby challenging the conventional view of the artist as a creator ex nihilo. Rather than inventing from nothing, the artist uncovers and makes visible the latent structures of a monadic reality—each painting presents a distinct perspective on the harmony, order, and expressive intensity that lie at the heart of Leibniz’s metaphysical vision. This reinforces the idea of ontological aesthetics and provides an innovative framework for engaging with visual art through key Leibnizian concepts, such as expression, perception, and unity in variety. This perspective underscores that aesthetic inquiry is not separate from Leibniz’s broader philosophical system but is embedded within his understanding of reality.