Despite the influence of abstraction (and the ensuing absence of figures), contemporary art still has plenty of figures, and they clearly resemble humans. But it is human nature to mimic and replicate. In an artwork, the figure is given an appearance and agency by its author, for it is the artist who creates the figure by following a certain something or someone. To quote from Gilles Deleuze and his cogito of art (that is, thinking or awareness), ‘there is no subject which acts without another which watches it act, and which grasps it as acted, itself assuming the freedom of which it deprives the former’. Photo: Didzis Grodzs.