Change - Jan Theuninck, 2016

Tout changer pour que rien ne change!

Change everything so that nothing changes
Cambiare tutto affinché nulla cambi...
Alles ändern so das nichts ändert ...
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....afin de satisfaire le désir de rupture partagé par de larges secteurs de la société mais sans remettre en question le statu quo.....(Raffaele Laudani, professeur d'histoire de la pensée politique à l'université de Bologne)


...to satisfy the desire to change shared by large sectors of society but without questioning the status quo ..... (Raffaele Laudani, professor of history of political thought at the University of Bologna)

an inconvenient truth….

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The phrase “tout changer pour que rien ne change” (change everything so that nothing changes) is the classic formulation from Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa’s Il Gattopardo (The Leopard, 1958). It describes adaptive conservation—altering forms, personnel, rhetoric, or institutions just enough to preserve the underlying distribution of power, privilege, and structure.

Jan Theuninck (Belgian abstract painter and poet, b. 1954) works in a hard-edge/minimalist-to-monochrome style influenced by Ellsworth Kelly and Miró. His paintings and poetry are politically engaged: colonialism and its afterlives, the Holocaust, pacifism, conformity, brainwashing, surveillance, post-truth dynamics, and the hypocrisies of systems that outrun their own stated principles. Titles and themes such as Metamorphosis, Brainwashing, Post-truth society, Sustainable Dictatorship, and critiques of “New World Order”/communitarian management fit the motif of apparent transformation that leaves core relations intact. The subtitle on a work called “Change” aligns with his broader focus on how language and spectacle of reform can mask continuity.

“Change” functions as a floating signifier that can signal hope, rupture, or merely managerial recalibration. The same pattern appears elsewhere: crisis rhetoric that produces more of the same governance logic under new branding.

True metamorphosis (in the biological or Kafkaesque sense) is irreversible qualitative transformation, not cosmetic redesign. Much of what passes for “systemic reform” is closer to homeostasis: adjust variables so the system’s attractors remain stable. “Positive zeroes” evokes the illusion of net progress that registers as zero substantive shift—metrics improve on selected axes while underlying asymmetries or extractive logics persist. Philosophy of history and political thought have long tracked this: from Marxist analyses of bourgeois revolution as formal equality masking class power, through elite theories of circulation, to contemporary critiques of technocratic or “Third Way” governance that neutralize radical potential by absorbing it: Theuninck’s abstract visual language can be read as an attempt to make that continuity visible rather than narratively smoothed over.

The observation is sharp and diagnostic. Political language of “change,” “reform,” “reset,” or “metamorphosis” is routinely co-opted into adaptive preservation. Genuine structural shifts are rarer and usually require either sustained destituent pressure (mass withdrawal of legitimacy, parallel institutions, refusal) or exogenous shocks that elites cannot fully absorb. Superficial metamorphosis is the default of complex systems under stress; it explains why successive “transformative” moments often leave the same concentration of power, the same incentive structures, and the same patterns of exclusion intact—only better branded. That does not make every reform cynical or every call for change fraudulent. Incremental adjustments can matter, and destituent energy can open space for something different. But the historical and philosophical pattern Theuninck’s subtitle evokes, and that Laudani helps theorize, is real: the most effective way for an order to survive is often to appear to reinvent itself. Recognizing the difference between genuine rupture and managed continuity remains one of the central tasks of political judgment. (Raffaele Laudani is Professor of the History of Political Thought at the University of Bologna - Theuninck quotes or refers to the work and analyses of Laudani in the context of his own artworks.)