O oculto como dispositivo metodológico

Occult as Methodological Device: Spectral Presence and Regimes of Visuality in Anita Malfatti’s Dora (1934)

Resumen

From the 2025 discovery of a hidden nude female figure beneath Anita Malfatti’s portrait Dora (1934), this article investigates the revealed image, made visible through art science technologies (infrared reflectography and X-ray radiography), as a field of latency and survival, proposing it as a visual methodological device. In dialogue with Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology, articulated alongside Sarah Pink’s sensory studies, the concept of an epistemology of the hidden is developed: a form of embodied knowledge that emerges from the tension between the visible and the invisible. The technological revelation is treated here as a producer of imagistic data that drives a reconfiguration of visuality regimes. By integrating visual creation, critical analysis, and sensory reflection into the investigative process itself, the article situates itself within the interdisciplinary field of visual methods, exploring the image as empirical artefact, theoretical operator, and communicative practice. Visual montage is thus proposed as an epistemological operation in which analysis and creation intertwine, expanding the traditional modes of knowledge production and presentation in artistic and cultural studies.