Everything comes around they say and art movements like fashion can also have a cyclical nature. One day the zeitgeist is just ready to understand or revisit ideas.
Abstract painting, once the centre of the storm in the post-war art world is making something of a comeback, particularly in the main country of its birth, the USA.
This piece from Abstract Critical caught my eye this week: “So why abstraction now? It’s not just the fickleness of fashion and taste. The most obvious attraction of abstract paintings is as a reaction against technology. It reflects our need for objects in a screen-based world. Real colour in paint is incredibly different to what you get from an inkjet printer or pixel. There’s something about material realness that these paintings bring to the fore. Texture as an antidote to the texturelessness of our lives.”
I think this is so true and I think it applies to all the plastic arts. As humans we need to connect to other humans through the marks they make the sounds they produce and the words they say. Abstraction can get to the unspoken matter of our thoughts and emotions in a very direct way, like music. We need to see a human presence in the art work not just an idea or concept.
Abstraction grew up partly as a reaction to the photograph and its visual dominance, now it is also a reaction to the screen images that permeate every area of our lives. Man by nature is a maker of marks and symbols and long may that continue.
I have just been working in paper on monotype abstracts and these are my Drawings du Jour:
“Broken Hearts 1 and 2”
Recent Comments