When De Kooning takes the floor at the symposium "What is Abstract Art?" held at the MoMa in 1951, the artist, who had gone through different pictorial journeys until he reached abstraction, refers to art as the always mute part you can talk about forever. And it is a great definition. From the beginning, abstract art has generated an intense debate that transcends artistic theory. Issues such as language, the formal or what is represented return again and again to the center of the discourse. "Even animals realize that we are not at home in the interpreted world." Hegel maintained that language forms and alienates us, and at the same time, makes us strangers to ourselves. Without exception, pictorial language has also been subject to interpellation and change. De Kooning insists on not differentiating between abstract or naturalistic painting, because according to him it is all part -and so it must be- of the tireless search of the artist who works to satisfy no one but himself. "If I paint abstract art, that's what abstract art means to me."

Although in the early years of the twentieth century pictorial abstraction was inevitably linked to a spiritual sense of searching for the invisible and the essence of nature that escapes the formal, today, beyond the dematerialization of the artistic object, abstraction is an exercise of perception that generates constant formal challenges. The search for the perfect plastic gesture, the connection with the world of the formal through the material or the conscious manipulation of pictorial matter. In the center of all of this: Doubt. Doubt as a fundamental part of the process, as a starting point of any creative exercise. The doubt that falls on the formal strategies, the techniques, the discourses. Abstract painting is at thesame time a finished work and an open reflection, there is no abstraction without understanding the experience of the artist who seeks to expand the field of visual perception. What to paint gives way to how to paint, and so often is in this pictorial process where artists find the starting point and the end of the road.

Perhaps that is why abstract painting has been described as painting for painters. A form of expression that is not easy to access due to its component of artistic research that starts from reflection and knowledge of one's own practice. Starting from nothing and beginning to build the painting. But just as abstract painting it is created in an active way, this is how it should be observed. To abstract oneself is to move away from the reality of the body, let be carried away by the gaze, create rhythms between the figures, connect the different parts, accept the formal ambiguity and the chromatism as an articulating component, and understand that the material contains its own language.

In What Abstract Art Means to Me, an exhibition that opens on January 25th at AlzuetaGallery's main space in Barcelona, the formal strategies of the eleven artists mentioned below become mixed even all of them navigate abstraction in different ways. Aythamy Armas presents his canvases as landscapes to be explored; Claudia Vasells investigates the emotional impact of colors and chromatic harmonies; Daniel Jensen uses references and pictorical techniques that converge in a personal universe; Enrich R. proposes mixed pictorial compositions based on abstract organic figures; in Guillermo Pfaff's work, chance and the sign become protagonists; Jin Angdoo uses his own vocabulary of codes brought to the canvas from the streets; Kes Richardson presents compositions on pvc in which the real and the imagined worlds converge; Lawrence Calver makes accidental gestures on recycled and previously treated materials; Manolo Ballesteros, with an almost magnetic chromatic force, generates large surfaces of color; Scott Licznerski creates works that orbit between control and the subconscious with the idea of capturing the permanence of an unrepeatable moment, and in Stan Van Steendam we witness an intimate process that derives in an almost sculptural painting.

Throughout the exhibition there is a succession of sharp angles, dancing lines, blocks of color and different textures that intervene with light and space. Geometric dimensions and chromatic codes wedge in generating a sort of common dialogue. When we look around us asking ourselves: What does abstract art mean to me? It is the works themselves who give us the answer. We just have to let ourselves get carried away by its language and, in an exercise of abstraction, experience our own from what is foreign.

Carolina-Laia Puigdevall

Press release courtesy Alzueta Gallery.