What do we mean when we talk about abstract art? The most comfortable notion might be that nothing on the canvas — or paper — is immediately identifiable. The lines and shapes are entirely unfamiliar to us and, try as we might, we cannot trace them or place them in the context of images and scenes already known to us. Attempts to isolate a shape that ‘looks like something else’ are beside the point.

We might be inclined to think that abstraction is a modern concern — something that grew out of the incremental constructions of Cézanne, or the galactical beauties of Kandinsky, the whimsies of Miró or the disciplined warp and weft of Mondrian’s geometries, but nothing could be further from the truth. We have only to think of the mark-marking by our early cousins — our prehistoric cousins, that is — to see that the impulse to incise or paint lines, chevrons, concentric rings and other entirely abstract motifs on clay, on rock and in the sand surfaced everywhere around the globe. This suggests some ritualised activity, some inner propulsion — like the red ochre spray which delivered a silhouette of early man’s hand against a cave wall, preserving forever this first impulse to externalise himself — which may forever elude complete interpretation. And in any case, mysteries are good for us.

Art critic Robert Hughes once had something to say about the pointlessness of trying to ‘read’ an abstract work or a work composed of unknown symbols. He said: “Content did not necessarily mean storytelling, and abstract art could embody it too. I can think of few painters more moving, on this very level of content, than the Spaniard Tàpies, who reminds us — more, perhaps, than any other living painter — of the fearful ritual of man leaving a mark on empty space.”

He also spoke of what abstraction could offer that the literal narrative painting could not.

“Communication, in the linguistic sense, is a splendid concept, but it fails to account for the comprehensions of reality we call the aesthetic experience. Rational communication, which was made possible by the invention of linguistic signs, is a recent thing compared to perceptual communication, which dates back beyond the Altamira cave paintings to 40,000 BC.”

The contemporary notion that a painting can reject entirely all illusionism (the imperative to recreate any realistic element of a world outside the canvas), and that the painter can bypass looking altogether and go straight to the expression of a state of mind, seems commonplace now. And, indeed, much American post-painterly abstraction, such as Mark Rothko’s hovering fields of light, was predicated on the notion that the abstract canvas could generate an emotional response from the viewer in the same way music might. But the post-war American phenomenon of Abstract Expressionism and post-painterly abstraction did not spring fully formed like Minerva from mid-town Manhattan. The seed had been introduced by such Europeans as Arshile Gorky and Max Ernst — even Marcel Duchamp — who were all seeking more congenial surroundings. However, it soon found its own bearings, most conspicuously in the work of Jackson Pollock.

Pollock’s later work was the very embodiment of physical action, hence the term ‘action painting’, which art critic Clement Greenberg deplored because he thought it was misleading — and worse — because it had been coined by his sparring partner Harold Rosenberg. The term gained currency. “And it wasn’t any good … it’s pretty much settled into ‘Abstract Expressionism’ and that’s not good either!” huffed Greenberg. This enigmatic commentator believed that a painting should have no reference points beyond itself; that the experience of it had to be contained within the frame — assuming there was one; and this idea, too, is now routine. In this issue of aAR, we focus on a number of excellent painters who might loosely stand under the umbrella of ‘abstraction’. They are Peter Sharp, whose work has unmistakable marine qualities; Lara Merrett and Yvonne Boag, who are striking colourists; Annabel Nowlan, whose restricted palette incorporates metal surfaces; the strict acrylic confections of John Nicholson; and the monochrome subtleties of David Serisier.