The Rescue of Intuition in Impressionist Creative Processes: From Philosophy to Neuroscience

This article presents Intuition, on the one hand, according to Aristotelian assumptions for the construction of knowledge, and on the other, as implicit in the concepts of sensorimotor contingency and embodied cognition. Both fronts, philosophical and neuroscientific, are brought into reference with the disruptive creative process developed by artists of the Impressionist movement, subjectively exploring the internal imagetic experiences developed between seeing and not seeing, between presences and absences. These presentified absences, in the light of neurobiology and its interdisciplinary connections, involve constructions filled by complex processing that associates different dimensions of perception, leading to the sensation of the presence of qualities that are physically absent in scenes and objects.