The book analyzes with particular care the problematic and paradoxical relationship of art with time. A journey through the art of the modern in its tensions and its revelations. The works of art allow us to look deeply into the problems of our time and into our conscience, a wide iconographic apparatus guides us in this exploration of the contemporary. Art has always been at the center of Franco Rella's critical-aesthetic reflection, articulated in a series of works that have also found space in the catalogs of the National Gallery in Rome, the Orsay Museum in Paris, the MART in Rovereto, the PAC in Milan and in numerous other public and private institutions. The essays that make up the chapters of this book deal above all with the problematic and paradoxical relationship of art with time. The work of art seems immune from time, eternal and always equal to itself, and yet it is full of time: its time and what it sets in motion in its relationship with other works, with other eras, with other sensitivity. The place where this plurality of times intertwine is the museum, but also the images that populate the streets of modern metropolitan cities, as Proust, Valéry and surrealism had seen, and as we see in Street art, or in the work of Kentridge.