Abstraction is like letting a bull loose in a china shop and then trying to interpret the debris. It is like a room in which the entire furniture is changed every day. Abstraction takes the familiar, throws it to the wind and scatters it to where, when it’s found, it will not be known what it is. It is like opening the dictionary of a foreign tongue nobody has ever spoken. It is a place in which we go with our usual collection of expectations and may find ourselves unable to satisfy even one of them – and we have no idea how this really feels. Faced with abstraction our emotional compass slips from our grasp, falls to ground, and breaks beyond repair. Within abstraction float the future wisps of words not yet formed in any human mind. By its very nature abstraction has the potential to put a stop to everything, for at least a moment or two. The subject of abstraction is new feeling. Abstraction acquaints us in the vaguest of measure with feelings yet to be named by humankind. Abstraction touches emotions we can barely discern and certainly can not name, yet we known are there, because they have been familiar to us for a long time. It is possible that abstract art activates abstract emotions which because they have no name, we lose the moment we feel them. An abstract can not tell you anything – you just have to listen to what emerges from the silence. Abstraction is a landscape that has been thrown into a concrete mixer and re-assembled with no reference to the original. It can kick our roots and foundations from under us. It scatters our reference points. It is as though we have suddenly gone through a doorway and into a wall-less, size-less depth-less room, the context equivalent of a vacuum. Abstraction presents us with a blank map, within which we must become our own cartographer.
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