Abstraction Doesn’t Exist

I’ve never been genuinely comfortable with the word abstraction as it relates to visual art. Perhaps it’s magnified overuse and inaccuracy can lead one to wonder why we use it as a descriptive word to begin with.  

Terminologies such as non-objective or nonfigurative are not idiosyncratic by nature and dwell in the realm of vagueness existing as catch words for historians and critics that are overly obsessed with categorisation. In fact what is thought to be abstract or non-representational is anything but that.

It is natural for humans to want to define and document. For it gives us a sense of identity as well as allowing us to be categorical and factual. I subjectively believe that identifying and creating genres from the perspective of visual art can be exceedingly more destructive and damaging than constructive and authentic.

As an artist, I can not conceive nor perceive limitation. Definitions by their very nature define and limit, which can creatively hinder us and bar us from association outside of our self-defined view by creating constraint.

Abstraction is defined as an existence in thought. A non-physical or concrete existence. So, we are pointing to the cerebral latitudes which is where ideas are formulated and intentions are projected. For we live in a dimension where thoughts create our realities, so in fact abstraction is very much authentically real.

In the end defining love, creativity and the mysteries of the Universe can inevitably propel us to a kingdom of the contrived, where passion, fascination and romance are replaced by the unspontaneous, denominated methodicalness.

Not everything is meant to be defined. Within the disciplines of visual art, let’s allow for holisticness, where the metaphysical and natural course of freewill unveil an experience, not an established construct of classification.

Kirk Sutherland