John Asimakos, Rick Burns, Susan Feindel, Carol Hoorn Fraser, Jean-Pierre Gauthier, Berry Goodwin, Jack Humphrey, Cal Lane, Rita Letendre, Claude Roussel, Roméo Savoie, Nancy King Schofield, Ron Shuebrook.
Abstraction was the great achievement of Modernism in the visual arts, supposedly freeing artists from representation, separating art from the world. It didn’t quite work out that way.
Abstraction has many meanings, and in visual art the one most ascribed to it is “non-representational.” But it also means something based on or representing an idea, something not real, but imagined by humans. And as such, of course, all art is abstract. Throughout the first decades of the 20th century painters toyed with abstraction, coming closer and closer to fully abandoning the image. The Swedish Hilma af Klint painted abstractions in 1906, the Russian painter Vassily Kandinsky in 1910 (or 1913, depending on who you believe). The Russian artist Kasimir Malevich painted a black square in 1915, which surely must have been the death knell of representation, right?
Wrong. Like a coward, painting has died a thousand deaths, and like a certain American humourist, the reports of its death were often exaggerated. Abstraction could never stop representation any more than photography could (another purported killer of painting), because of that second meaning of abstraction – being based on ideas. And ideas are persistent, even if it is just the idea of painting without representation.
Another kind of abstraction is non-objective art, art that tries to avoid using any references to the real world. Non-representative painting may still be based on familiar objects; it is just that the artist has distorted or changed their image so much as to make them unrecognizable. Non-objective art tends to be geometric or based in colour relations, both approaches that try to skirt the edges of reality. Of course, we can’t really escape the world, we’re in it like goldfish in their bowl. But the attempt is valiant, if doomed, and artist’s keep trying. They also try to skirt the edges of abstraction, hinting at imagery rather than embracing it, for instance, getting close to the edge without ever tipping over.
Sculpture, because it is unequivocally part of the world, is less prone to these sorts of discussions. But it, too, had to deal with the Modernist zeal for reduction. A “non-objective” sculpture is a contradiction in terms, but sculpture can be non-representational—though a sculpture is always a thing, and thus always in the world (so are paintings of course, we just tend to think of them as images rather than the objects that they truly are). Artworks, any artworks, are essentially attempts to translate ideas from our heads to our worlds. And as such, artworks are as diverse, as contradictory, as conflicted, and as revelatory as are the heads that dreamed them up. We humans endlessly fascinate ourselves, and art is one of the most persistent expressions of that fascination.
The artists whose works are included in At Abstraction’s Edges embrace different approaches to abstraction, some whole-heartedly reject imagery, others distort and adapt images from the world, still others create new objects that have no counterpart. All of them are using art to think about the world in new ways, and to challenge us to follow along on their journey.
Artwork: Romeo Savoie, Beuys, 1987, Mixed media on canvas, 183 x 366.
