BLOG—THOUGHTS ON ABSTRACTION

Art in the Parallax Gap

Non representational painting is a negation of physical reality and initially needs to be described as what it is not. It does not represent a thing, a person or a place. There is no story or narrative it's trying to tell. Simply put, it does not represent material reality. It’s the same with nonobjective painting, often geometric but not always, it can strive for ideas of purity and virtue without relying on material symbols. They both work in that gap between the material and the immaterial.

I describe my work as nonrepresentational and as an exploration of what exists in the space between thoughts. A pursuit to catch a glimpse of the sublime* in the flux of uncertainty. Nonobjective and nonrepresentational art tries to open up a dialogue within the space between existing ideas. A space between the perceptible and the intangible, between the material and the experienced.


What occupies this gap? What kind of “dark matter” resides in the gap between experience and knowledge; action and contemplation; seeing and knowing; thinking and doing? Could the gap be a doorway between these contradictions giving us access to new ideas and new ways of thinking? That's what artists are exploring.


"The truth is revealed in the process of transiting the contradictions; or the real is a 'minimal difference', the gap between the infinite judgement of a reductionist materialism and experience as lived" -Slavoj Zizek


Compared to other types of painting, thinking about nonrepresentational/nonobjective art as operating in a parallax gap reveals a different kind of truth. Truth in painting isn't just the end result of the fixed painted form, the dried paint on the canvas. Additionally, it is not just in the process of painting either, the act of applying paint to canvas. It’s a combination of thinking about both perspectives, or more accurately, its power lies in the gap between those two perspectives: between the act of painting and the fixed form. The painting, the final form, is a record of the struggle to transit the material and the experienced.


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*I have trouble using the word “sublime.” I don’t intend to use it as some sort of religious entity, but as something that is deeply personal, so deeply personal that it becomes universal and ineffable.