This is a tryptich work (dimensions: 100x130cm each).
Where Kant evokes the sublime as the reaction to the immensity of the mountain or the raging sea, for Hegel, the emphasis is on the incompatible and incomparable, on the dissonance between appearance and reality: on failure. This failure manifests itself in the subject as an impossibility to perceive what comes first: the predefined symbolic structure - the expectation of the event; or the overwhelming event itself. In this case, the sublime manifests itself as the difference between them, which will have to be excluded for both to maintain mutual congruence.
In this triptych the strugle between the subject and the cocodile represents the experience of the sublime as it mediates between the subject's indeterminate interiority and the equally indeterminate object that threatens to dominate the subject, revealing its deepest subjectivity. But since, at the limit, the sublime is still related to the subject's representation of the object, the sublime can be defined as that within representation exceeds the possibility of representation. It characterizes the extreme cases of search for the truth condemned to failure.
