The purity and the vertigo: When art frees itself from the visible world
Imagine a Parisian studio in 1912. Winter light filters through grimy windows, barely illuminating the canvases stacked against the walls. In one corner, a man with bushy eyebrows stares at a blank sheet of paper, brush in hand. His name is Piet Mondrian. That morning, he has just laid down a black
By Artedusa
••12 min read
The purity and the vertigo: when art frees itself from the visible world
Imagine a Parisian studio in 1912. Winter light filters through grimy windows, barely illuminating the canvases stacked against the walls. In one corner, a man with bushy eyebrows stares at a blank sheet of paper, brush in hand. His name is Piet Mondrian. That morning, he has just laid down a black stroke on the canvas—a simple horizontal line. Then another, vertical. Between them, rectangles of pure color: red, blue, yellow. Nothing else. No tree, no house, no sky. Just these lines and these flat planes. His friend, the painter Theo van Doesburg, bursts in without knocking. "Have you lost your mind?" he exclaims. Mondrian doesn’t answer. He steps back, tilts his head. In that silence, something revolutionary has just been born: art no longer needs the world to exist.
This gesture—reducing, purifying, distilling—is not merely a technique. It is a metaphysical quest, a battle against the superfluous, a way of touching the very essence of things. How does one go from a Cézanne landscape, where every apple seems to breathe, to a black square on a white background? What vertigo seizes the artist when he decides to sacrifice resemblance? And above all: what remains when everything has been stripped away?
Mondrian’s last tree
Before becoming the prophet of straight lines, Piet Mondrian painted trees. Docile trees, at first, in the Dutch tradition of the 19th century. Then increasingly stylized trees, as if he sought to capture their soul rather than their appearance. In 1908, The Red Tree is still a whirlwind of scarlet branches, almost expressionist. Three years later, The Gray Tree reduces itself to a skeletal silhouette, where each branch seems to struggle against its own form. Finally, in 1912, Apple Tree in Bloom is nothing more than a network of black lines on a white ground—the tree has vanished, only its inner rhythm remains.
This metamorphosis is not a linear evolution, but a series of farewells. With each canvas, Mondrian buries the visible world a little more. "I felt that only the abstract could provide the solution," he would later write. But this solution comes at a price: the abandonment of everything that makes things immediately beautiful. His painter friends, like Kandinsky, reproach him for "killing poetry." He persists, convinced that truth hides in purity.
The paradox is that this quest for purity arises from an obsession with the real. Mondrian spends hours observing house facades, canal grates, the checkerboards of fields. What he seeks is not abstraction for abstraction’s sake, but a way to capture the invisible order of the world. His straight lines are not arbitrary: they reproduce the tension between the verticality of trees and the horizontality of horizons. His primary colors are not an aesthetic choice, but an attempt to grasp the very essence of light.
Cézanne, or the art of breaking apples
If Mondrian is the high priest of purity, Paul Cézanne is its methodical demolisher. In his studio in Aix-en-Provence, he spends years painting the same subjects: apples, bathers, Mont Sainte-Victoire. But these motifs, far from being repetitions, are battlegrounds. Cézanne does not seek to reproduce nature; he reconstructs it according to a new logic.
Take his Apples and Oranges (1899). At first glance, it is a classic still life. Yet something is off. The fruits are not placed on the table: they seem to float in an uncertain space. The contours are not sharp, but made of small parallel strokes that make the apples appear to vibrate. The perspective is wrong—the table tilts, the fruits seem about to roll. Cézanne does not paint what he sees, but what he knows: that reality is unstable, that perception is a lie.
"Treat nature by the cylinder, the sphere, the cone," he writes to a young painter in 1904. This phrase, often cited as a manifesto of abstraction, is in fact a provocation. Cézanne does not reduce nature to geometric forms—he reveals that these forms are already there, hidden beneath the surface of things. His bathers are not bodies, but architectures of flesh. Mont Sainte-Victoire is not a mountain, but an accumulation of colored planes colliding like tectonic plates.
What Cézanne invents, without realizing it, is a new way of seeing. By rejecting the illusions of perspective, he paves the way for Picasso, Braque, and the entire 20th century. But unlike the Cubists, who will shatter reality into a thousand pieces, Cézanne always keeps one foot in the visible. His canvases are bridges between two worlds: that of appearances and that of invisible structures.
Malevich and the scandal of nothingness
On December 19, 1915, an exhibition opens in Petrograd amid a buzz of rumors. Strange canvases are on display: floating circles, dynamic crosses, and above all, a black square on a white background. The public snickers, critics are outraged. "A pot of paint thrown in the public’s face," writes one. The painter, Kazimir Malevich, smiles. He knows he has just committed a symbolic murder.
Black Square on White Ground is not a painting. It is a manifesto, a provocation, a declaration of war against five centuries of Western art. By reducing painting to its simplest expression—a monochrome square—Malevich kills illusionism, anecdote, beauty. Nothing remains but pure idea, the "zero of form," as he would later call it.
To understand Malevich’s audacity, one must return to the context of the time. Russia is in the midst of revolution. Artists, like the rest of the country, seek to rebuild everything. But Malevich goes further than the others: he wants an art that represents nothing, serves no purpose, tells no story. An art that would be, simply, a spiritual experience.
His subsequent canvases push the logic to its extreme. White Square on White Ground (1918) is even more radical: the square is barely distinguishable from the background. The work seems to disappear, as if Malevich had wanted to paint the invisible. "I have reached the white, that is, the void, absolute freedom," he writes. For him, abstraction is not an aesthetic, but an asceticism.
The most ironic thing is that this quest for nothingness would become a symbol of modernity. Today, Black Square is an icon, reproduced on T-shirts, posters, book covers. Malevich, who wanted to free art from all function, created an image more recognizable than the Mona Lisa. The void has become a commodity.
Rothko, or color as pure emotion
If Malevich seeks nothingness, Mark Rothko, on the other hand, wants to touch the infinite. In his New York studio in the 1950s, canvases stretch like inner landscapes. Rectangles of color float on dark backgrounds, like windows opening onto elsewhere. Rothko does not paint forms: he paints states of mind.
Take No. 61 (Rust and Blue) (1953). At first glance, it is a simple canvas: two superimposed rectangles, one rust, the other midnight blue, on a gray background. But upon closer inspection, an unsuspected depth emerges. The edges of the rectangles are not sharp: they seem to breathe, as if the color were escaping the canvas. Layers of paint, applied in successive glazes, create a strange luminosity, almost mystical.
Rothko hated it when people spoke of "abstraction" in relation to his work. For him, his canvases were not stylistic exercises, but "dramas"—scenes where the great human emotions unfold: joy, fear, transcendence. "I am not an abstract painter, I am not interested in the relationship of forms or colors," he said. "I am only interested in the expression of fundamental human emotions."
This quest for pure emotion requires radical simplification. Rothko eliminates everything that might distract: lines, contours, details. Only color remains, in all its raw power. His canvases are sensory experiences: they are not looked at, they are felt. In the chapel that bears his name in Houston, visitors often sit in silence before his black paintings. Some cry. Others stay for hours, as if hypnotized.
Rothko wanted his canvases to have a physical effect on the viewer. "A painting lives only through the company of the one who looks at it," he said. His rectangles are not forms: they are doors opening onto the unconscious.
Abstraction as a universal language
Why does purity fascinate artists so much? Because it is a quest for the universal. By eliminating the particular, the anecdotal, the contingent, abstract painters seek to touch something that transcends cultures and eras.
Mondrian dreams of an art that would be like a mathematical equation: true for all, everywhere. Malevich wants to create a visual language that speaks directly to the soul, without words. Rothko seeks to awaken primitive emotions, common to all human beings.
This idea of a universal language is not new. It can be found among the Greek philosophers, who saw geometric forms as the foundations of the world. It resurfaces during the Renaissance, with treatises on perspective. But it is in the 20th century that it takes on an almost mystical dimension.
For Kandinsky, forms and colors have a magical power. The triangle is active, the circle is spiritual, yellow is joyful. In Concerning the Spiritual in Art (1911), he develops a theory of correspondences between sounds, colors, and emotions. His goal? To create a painting that would be like a symphony, capable of touching the viewer directly, without passing through reason.
This quest for universality explains why abstraction conquered the world in just a few decades. From the United States to the USSR, from Japan to Brazil, artists seized these purified forms to express their vision of the world. Even in countries where figurative art dominated, like Mexico with the muralists, abstraction eventually imposed itself as an indispensable language.
The paradox of purity: the simpler it is, the more complex it becomes
There is something vertiginous about abstraction: the simpler a work appears, the more complex it is in reality. A black square by Malevich or a red rectangle by Rothko seems accessible at first glance. Yet their interpretation is infinite.
Take Mondrian’s Composition with Red, Blue, and Yellow. At first glance, it is a geometric canvas, almost decorative. But upon closer inspection, a subtle tension between the forms emerges. The black lines are not perfectly straight: they vibrate slightly, as if struggling against their own rigidity. The colored rectangles are not symmetrical: they create a dynamic imbalance. This canvas, which seems so simple, is in fact the result of a precarious balance between order and chaos.
This paradox explains why abstraction is so divisive. Some see it as a liberation, a way to free oneself from the constraints of representation. Others see it as an impoverishment, a flight from the complexity of the world. Between these two extremes, there is a whole range of positions.
For defenders of abstraction, like critic Clement Greenberg, purity is a historical necessity. After centuries of illusionistic painting, it was necessary to return to the very essence of the medium: the flat surface, pure color, autonomous form. For detractors, like philosopher Theodor Adorno, abstraction is a dead end: by refusing to represent the world, it cuts itself off from any political or social dimension.
The truth probably lies somewhere in between. Abstraction is neither a miracle solution nor a dead end. It is a tool, like the brush or the palette, that allows for the exploration of new ways of seeing and thinking.
When purity becomes a trap
The history of abstraction is also the history of its excesses. In their quest to simplify, some artists ended up creating works devoid of meaning, mere stylistic exercises.
In the 1960s, Minimalism pushed the logic of purity to its extreme. Artists like Donald Judd or Agnes Martin created works reduced to their simplest expression: metal cubes, lines drawn in pencil on vast canvases. The goal? To eliminate all traces of subjectivity, all emotion, to retain only the pure object.
But this quest for absolute purity has its limits. By refusing any reference to the outside world, Minimalism risks becoming a cold, dehumanized art. As critic Michael Fried notes, these works are no longer paintings or sculptures, but mere "objects"—things among others, without any transcendence.
Today, abstraction is everywhere: in galleries, of course, but also in design, fashion, architecture. It has become a dominant language, almost a norm. Yet this ubiquity raises questions. When purity becomes a style, a recipe, a way of being "modern," does it not lose its subversive power?
Perhaps this is the greatest danger of abstraction: that it becomes a mere aesthetic, stripped of its revolutionary charge. That Malevich’s black squares end up as posters for students, and Rothko’s rectangles as patterns for cushions.
Abstraction, an endless quest
Yet despite these pitfalls, abstraction remains a fascinating adventure. Because it is never finished. Because it constantly asks the same question: what remains when everything has been stripped away?
Today, new artists are taking up the torch, but with different tools. Some use artificial intelligence to create unprecedented forms. Others blend abstraction and figuration, like Julie Mehretu, whose canvases evoke both geographic maps and cosmic explosions. Still others, like Olafur Eliasson, play with perception to create immersive experiences.
Abstraction is not dead. It has simply changed form. It is no longer a radical break with the past, but a way of dialoguing with it. It is no longer a quest for absolute purity, but an exploration of the boundaries between the visible and the invisible, the real and the imaginary.
Perhaps the true genius of abstraction lies precisely in this: reminding us that art does not need to represent the world to transform it. That a simple line, a splash of color, a black square can contain entire universes. That in purifying, one does not lose the complexity of the real—one reveals it.
So the next time you come across an abstract canvas, don’t ask what it represents. Ask what it makes you feel. And if you think it says nothing to you, look at it longer. Perhaps it is waiting for you.
The purity and the vertigo: When art frees itself from the visible world | Creativity
