The studio light catches a brushstroke that’s half dry. It curves like a rib, then dissolves into a smear of cadmium red. I’ve just finished a canvas where a shoulder blade becomes a geometric plane, and a grid of lines holds the memory of a collarbone. For me, this isn’t a transition between two modes. It’s the same breathing thing. Yet the art world keeps asking: is it figurative, or is it abstract? The question is a symptom of a deeper failure—a failure to see how form and formlessness have always been locked in a political and perceptual struggle.
When I hear “figuration versus abstraction,” I hear a binary constructed to manage art markets, art history textbooks, and exhibition catalogues. It’s a division that pretends to be about style but is actually about control. The real problem is that treating these tendencies as opposites erases the radical middle ground where paint, body, and meaning collide without asking permission.
The Historical Wound: How Modernism Severed the Body From the Grid
We inherit a narrative that abstraction liberated painting from the tyranny of representation. Clement Greenberg’s teleology pushed toward flatness, opticality, the removal of anecdote. In this story, the figure became a nostalgic anchor, a conservative refusal to enter the purity of the modernist project. Figuration was supposedly stuck in anecdote, in the literal, in the social. Abstraction was transcendental, autonomous, clean. But this autonomy was always a fantasy with material consequences.
Think of the post-war moment. Abstract Expressionism in the United States was wielded as cultural propaganda—a sign of individual freedom against Soviet Socialist Realism. The supposedly apolitical gestures of Pollock or Rothko were deeply political in their deployment. Meanwhile, figurative painters were often dismissed as regionalists, illustrators, or political propagandists. The binary was never just aesthetic. It was a Cold War tool. It sorted which bodies mattered, which marks could signify freedom, and which were chained to representation and, by extension, to a kind of political literalism.
This sorting mechanism never went away. It just mutated. Contemporary art fairs still slot galleries into aisles of chromatic fields or aisles of distorted bodies. Collectors still describe themselves as preferring “figurative work” or “abstract work” as if these were personality types. The wound is historical, but the bleeding is current. Every time a young painter is told their blurred face isn’t “abstract enough” or their color field lacks “content” without a recognizable form, the old Cold War binary reasserts itself.
The Perceptual Lie: We Never See Without Recognition
There’s a perceptual lie at the core of the opposition. It assumes that abstraction is pure retinal experience, while figuration is cognitive recognition. But neuroscience and phenomenology dismantle this. The brain does not separate form from meaning. A gray trapezoid on a white ground is never just a gray trapezoid. It triggers spatial associations, memories of light, the weight of shadow. Gestalt psychology shows we complete forms. We see clouds as animals. We find faces in wood grain. The eye is a meaning-making organ, and it refuses to stay in the lane marked “non-objective.”
Conversely, a highly realistic rendering of a hand is not just a hand. Brushwork, chromatic temperature, edge hardness—these are abstract events happening on the surface. Lucian Freud’s flesh is a thick topography of oil paint before it is a portrait. The paint insists on its materiality. The illusion and the substance exist simultaneously. When we treat figuration as a window and abstraction as a wall, we deny the simultaneity that makes painting a living act. We pretend the viewer can switch off part of their consciousness. They can’t. The retinal and the associative are fused.
Body as Method: Where Paint Becomes Flesh and Flesh Becomes Structure
In my own work, I’ve never experienced a clean break. A painting might begin with the memory of a specific person’s posture—the way a shoulder slopes under fatigue. But as the brush moves, that slope becomes a diagonal line intersecting a vertical. The diagonal needs a counterweight, so a patch of umber appears. That patch is not a shadow; it’s a compositional demand. But it also is a shadow, because the eye reads it as one. The painting operates in both registers at once, and the tension between them is the content.
This method isn’t unique to me. It runs through art history like an underground river. Look at Francis Bacon’s figures trapped in geometric cages. The cage is abstract—a few lines of white paint—but it’s also a psychological architecture. Look at Joan Mitchell’s landscapes that were never landscapes, yet hold the light of a specific afternoon. Look at the late de Kooning, where the figure dissolved into ribbon-like strokes but never stopped being flesh. These painters understood that the body is not a theme to be represented. It’s a method. The body is how we know scale, gravity, tension, release. Abstraction without the memory of the body is decoration. Figuration without the structural demands of abstraction is mere description.
Political Forms: The Refusal to Choose as a Refusal of Order
Why does this matter politically? Because binaries are instruments of power. They simplify the complex so it can be ranked, priced, and segregated. The figuration-abstraction binary mirrors other false dichotomies: reason versus emotion, mind versus body, public versus private. These pairs are not descriptive. They are prescriptive. They tell us what can be thought together and what must be kept apart. When an artist refuses the binary, they refuse the underlying logic of separation.
Consider the way certain bodies have been historically represented. The female nude in Western art is a site of intense figuration—anatomically detailed, lit for consumption. Abstraction in this context can be a refusal of that consumption. When a painter breaks the body into planes, obscures the gaze, or dissolves the flesh into gesture, they are not just making a formal choice. They are rejecting the demand for legibility that makes a body available for ownership. The politics are inside the brushwork. They are in the decision to let a face become a field of marks that cannot be easily read as passive or available. The refusal to separate figuration from abstraction is, at its core, a refusal to let power dictate what can be seen and how.
The Pedagogy Problem: How Art Schools Reinforce the Split
Art education often perpetuates this division with shocking rigidity. Foundation programs separate “observational drawing” from “abstract design.” Life drawing classes happen in one room. Color theory happens in another. Critique language reinforces the split: “This piece feels unresolved—is it abstract, or are you trying to represent something?” The question itself assumes a resolution would require choosing a side. It trains young artists to police their own impulses, to cut off a mark that drifts toward recognition, or to suppress a geometric impulse because it “breaks the illusion.”
This pedagogical violence produces artists who are fluent in one grammar and illiterate in the other. They learn to paint figures without understanding how a rectangle of negative space can activate an entire composition. Or they learn to paint fields of color without understanding how the memory of a horizon line haunts every division of the canvas. The result is work that is technically proficient but sensorially thin. The deepest painters—the ones whose work stays in the body—are almost always those who unlearned this division, often at great personal cost. They had to find their way back to a wholeness that the institution broke apart.
Toward a Unified Field: Seeing the Continuum
What would it mean to treat figuration and abstraction not as poles but as a single continuum, a spectrum along which attention moves? It would mean looking at a painting and asking not “what is it of?” or “what is it about?” but “what is it doing?” It would mean recognizing that a brushstroke is always both a mark and a reference. The reference might be to a thigh, a horizon, a memory of pressure, or the speed of the painter’s own arm. All of these are present, all at once. The question is not whether the painting is figurative or abstract, but which layer of reference the painter is foregrounding, and why, and what the political stakes of that foregrounding are.
This isn’t a call for a mushy middle where everything is half-resolved. Quite the opposite. The most rigorous paintings are often the ones that hold the tension most sharply—where a highly articulated hand emerges from a completely flat, non-illusionistic ground, and the discontinuity is the point. The friction between modes is generative. It’s where meaning sparks. To dissolve the binary isn’t to dissolve distinction. It’s to replace an oppositional model with a dialectical one, where figuration and abstraction are not enemies but forces that produce a third thing in their encounter. That third thing is the painting itself, irreducible to either term.
I think of a painting I made last winter. A woman’s back, seen from above, the spine a pale ridge. But the skin is not skin. It’s a series of gray and blue rectangles, built up in thin glazes. The rectangles obey the logic of the grid. They also obey the logic of light falling on a curved surface. Neither logic wins. The painting is the argument between them. When someone stands before it, their own body engages in that argument. Their spine remembers the grid. Their eyes toggle between the flatness and the depth. That toggling is the experience. It’s not a problem to be solved. It’s the work.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why did the division between figuration and abstraction become so rigid in the 20th century?
The rigidity hardened through a combination of formalist criticism and geopolitical strategy. Greenberg’s emphasis on medium-specificity and flatness created a hierarchy that placed pure abstraction at the pinnacle of modernist progress. Simultaneously, during the Cold War, abstraction was promoted by institutions like the Museum of Modern Art as an emblem of Western individualism, contrasting with the state-mandated figurative realism of the Soviet bloc. This fused aesthetic judgment with political ideology, making the division seem natural when it was actually manufactured.
Can a painting be both deeply abstract and deeply political without figurative elements?
Absolutely, but the politics reside in the context and the material decisions. A monochrome painting in a society that polices color, expression, and public space can be a radical act of refusal. The scale, the surface, the choice of industrial or hand-mixed pigment—these carry class and labor implications. However, when the abstraction-figuration binary is enforced, abstraction is often falsely depoliticized, labeled as purely spiritual or formal. The task is to read the political content in the material gesture itself, not to require a recognizable body to signal political intent.
How can artists trained in a bifurcated system begin to integrate these modes in their practice?
Begin by collapsing the observational and the structural in a single session. Paint from life, but impose a strict abstract armature—a diagonal grid, a limited palette with no local color, a rule about mark-making. Or work from a purely abstract starting point, then introduce a single, highly specific perceptual memory. The goal isn’t to blend the modes seamlessly but to let them conflict on the canvas. Pay attention to where the conflict is most uncomfortable. That discomfort is often the site of the most urgent visual thinking. Also, study painters who navigated this territory—look long at the late works of Philip Guston, the cut-outs of Matisse, the encaustic bodies of Jasper Johns. See how the oscillation is not indecision but a precise instrument.
The problem with treating figuration and abstraction as opposites is that it blinds us to the actual structure of visual experience. It forces a choice where none is required, and in doing so, it diminishes the capacity of painting to hold complexity. The body is not a theme. Geometry is not a retreat. They are two vocabularies for the same inquiry into what it means to be a sensing, political, mortal thing in a world of forms. The canvas is where those vocabularies argue, overlap, and refuse to be reconciled. That refusal is not a flaw. It’s the discipline.