Pensamiento

Abstraction isn’t the final destination of a painter. It is a “round-trip station”. Artists’ curiosity and their search for substance and form make it almost inevitable for them to arrive at abstraction. They give it everything they have to offer from their interior and their particular perception, and once they have done that, they feel the need to return to reality. That is not to say that abstraction isn’t real, but that “reality” is experienced by the painter through their very own sensations, whereas abstraction is born in the very moment the work is being created. 

That is why I am weary of abstract painters who commit to abstraction until the end of their careers. Within every abstraction exists, if not on the canvas, in the mind of the painter, a realist painting. It is that reality, mediated by the painter, that comes to the surface taking the form that the painter’s mind has been able to give it in a specific moment in time. Every abstract painting is born out of a real idea; one can’t paint an abstraction of abstraction, for abstraction is only the result of the evolution of the painter’s idea, which is rooted in reality and personal experience. I believe every painter will reach the point of abstraction at one point in their career. If they don’t express it on canvas, it will however be on their minds; their demons will always follow them if they don’t let them out of their interior and give them a life of their own on the canvas.