“The Incredulity of Baudrillard” oil on canvas 90*120

“The Incredulity of Baudrillard” oil on canvas 90*120 (2025)

This work is an intentional reimagining of Caravaggio’s The Incredulity of Saint Thomas, replacing the original biblical figures with Nietzsche, Baudrillard, Wittgenstein, and behind them Agamben. According to the biblical narrative, after Jesus’s resurrection, the apostle Thomas doubted his return until Jesus invited him to touch the wound which made by a spear. I recreated this moment to explore the lasting influence of Nietzsche on modern thought.

Nietzsche, in a sense, “philosophized with a hammer” breaking apart conventional an personal truths with extreme consequences. His philosophy confronts us with the idea that we live with our ghosts: systematic beliefs, daily meanings, and deep historical burdens from which we cannot escape, not now, not in the future, unless we transcend for more; something “übermenschlich”.

Nietzsche saw within us a potential to unveil truth not as an abstract ideal, but as something that must be reached through a return to our embodied existence. In this sense, his legacy is not merely in his writings, but in the corporeal way he called us to live and to seek.

Following this path, we find Wittgenstein, Agamben, and Baudrillard each followed this path in their own way. Agamben explored possible nudity of this conceptual world. Wittgenstein chose silence to protect himself from terms. Baudrillard became afraid of a world where nothing seen real anymore.

In this work they examine Nietzsche’s philosophy which still appears us with his powerful echoing. They touch his hole on his chest, not to confirm belief, but to search for something tangible to hold on to. So this Nietzsche’s “Second Coming” might offer a way out of the sovereignty of European conformist nihilism, which entraps us not only as buyers or workers, but as digital profiles.

In my view, Nietzsche could be the savior of modernity; a modernity that swallows everything into its mediocre stomach, because he offered us one gift: the courage to jump into unknown, to risk everything so that others might one day fly from edges. Perhaps this sacrifice, this “radical screaming of his rage,” is his true legacy.