"With abstraction the problem is more one of sustaining pictorial energy than of keeping an image intact. . .
in a sense abstraction gains its freedom, its unfettered expandability, its own working space by eluding
the spatial dictates of the real and the ideal image."     
Frank Stella    ' Working Space '   

Figuration - Abstraction :

Why does a considerable part of our culture comprehend art as representation, as a (visual) correspondence between object and subject, as ‘familiar’ picture.  It gauges artistic proficiency as portrayal, as depiction.  One might argue that a visual sophistication is far from us, that, in fact, we have innocently reached a comfortable analytical bottom.  Our lowest common denominator of resemblance, of this equals that, and that it insures not only picturial agreement between copy and original, but intellectual sedateness.
 

Language:

I n contrast to the figural image, where its power of communication lies in its representational qualitiy, its truth to an original, the communicative capacity of abstraction resides in the freedom that it imparts to the complex processes of perception, a potential that is devoid of academic knowledge or systematic disposition, one that is consolidated solely on the possibilities of uninhibited and direct observation. In other words, where visual experience is not influenced by instituted rhetoricalconcepts and it is the development and expansion of such experience that allows the various states of psychic and poetic development to unfold.

 Although presented as visual totalities, through the process of fragmentation and assemblage, the drawings propose a paradoxical conceptual order that negates the possibility of a compositional synthesis. Through various strategies of de-stabilizing the traditional modes of graphic presentation these drawings avoid a compositional cohesiveness that, typical of figural works, may suggest a self sufficient entity with its attendant pathos and psychic manifestations that they may      impart upon the viewer.
 

De-Stabilization:

There are several methods of de-stabilizing the conceptual-visual totality of these drawings. Apart from the horizontal order of the binding, one method is the absence of a preferred viewing direction, of an indication of a `picture' in the traditional sense; i.e., the drawings invite inspection from any direction and judgments of orientation are left to the discretion of the observer. A second mode of undermining the traditional idea of wholeness is the plurality of possible tectonic relationships where all attempts at a cohesive (conventional) reading collapse. The drawings, composed of interchangeable parts, defy all attempts to locate the "finished" composition as a closed system and the natural incompatibility of the various parts, against a cultural memory of integral appearance, is always present. As such the paradox is never dismissed and their phenomenology becomes a provisional phenomenology, a trans-phenomenology in fact, where incongruity becomes a provocation to move beyond a traditional or sanctioned interpretation into the realm of the dream-image.

A third method is the absence of traditional formal organizational strategies. Such conventional grammatical component-elements such as boundary, centrality, symmetry and inflection give way to an overall planning that is devoid of established compositional devices. The potentially infinite number of permutations destroy a definitive reading, and any wholeness is made possible only through a mental integration where every visual-mental time frame is established as a component of other possible frames and ultimately of a broader assemblage implying a continuous process. The unity of these abstract drawings, then, depends not on a grammatical structure but on a heterogeneous identity, one that lies in a field of differing structural relations whose very nature resists a unified structure of consideration and becomes whole only to the extent that an observer admits the possibility of unity; i.e., to the extent that he or she experiences the compositional connections as aspects of a larger trans-physical totality.