Importance of Abstract Painting

Starting in the last decades of the 19th century, a new way of representing reality appeared on the Western pictorial scene, absolutely disruptive of the known order. This new form was that of abstract pictorial art, the one that seeks to raise the interiority and the subjectivity of the artist when it comes to understanding what surrounds him and it is in this way that he becomes only.

What is abstract art: first approach to the idea

To better understand the idea of ​​what an abstract painting represents, we can say that it is characterized by showing the reality that surrounds us in an alternative way. You may even seek to represent imaginary items, dreams, and fantasies. All this is not done from a figurative and concrete aspect but is based on the construction of the image through geometric shapes, lines, unreal colors, silhouettes and even many elements that are highly stimulating from the viewer's visual point of view.

Abstract painting does not seek to demonstrate a scene, a landscape or a body, but seeks to create alternative ways of representing all those same elements. There are those who maintain that a painting of this type is intended to put the artist in more direct contact with his interiority, since it does not give rise to reality to intervene with known images or that can be found around us. around. Thus, an abstract painter does not necessarily paint a landscape but rather the very subjectivity of that landscape or even something that he did not know beforehand but that he carried within him.

The break with academic and figurative painting

Historically, most of the history of art Western has focused on the construction of painting from an empirical or realistic point of view. This means that he sought for many centuries to represent what was observed in reality. However, it is at the end of the 19th century with the impressionism that this indisputable way of acting began to change.

Impressionist painters sought to show reality from different points of view, with highly charged brushstrokes that made the real silhouettes of objects lose. The same time, they painted the same scenes with different types of light or with more deformed geometric shapes, which visually generated very striking effects and which were highly criticized at the time. They were considered artists who did not know how to paint.

From them, the avant-garde of the 20th century took these elements as central and disfigured the reality to transform it into unique and groundbreaking, creative and abstract elements, full of forms, of color and silhouettes never seen before.

Images: Fotolia. phanuwatnandee – serge-b