ARTICLE 3 — EXPLORING ABSTRACTION
When the Work Becomes a Presence
A study by Marie Dernoncourt — 2026
After the first inventions came a period of expansion and rupture. The Second World War did not alone explain the transformations of art, but it profoundly altered their context: European certainties had been wounded, New York became a major artistic centre, and many painters refused to return to established forms as though nothing had happened. Abstraction no longer sought only a language. It became an action, a material, a surface put to the test — at times even a silence.
After 1945: Beginning Again Without Erasing
Speaking of “post-war art” may create the illusion of a clean beginning. Reality is more complex. Artists extended enquiries already under way: Surrealist automatism, geometric abstraction, collage, an interest in chance and in ordinary materials. But these legacies took on a different weight in a world marked by destruction, displacement and the discovery of mass crimes.
It would nevertheless be precarious to read every canvas as the direct translation of historical trauma. Works of art are neither scans of the psyche nor transparent documents. What is established, however, is the scale of the shifts: enlarged formats, painting laid on the floor, materials burnt or sewn, surfaces thickened, pierced or slit. The work no longer merely represents an experience; it materially carries its conditions.
The Canvas Becomes a Site of Action
In the United States, Abstract Expressionism brought together, from the 1940s onwards, artists whose practices remained very different. The term is useful for situating a scene and a period, but it does not describe a single style. Jackson Pollock, Lee Krasner, Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline, Mark Rothko and Barnett Newman did not make the same kind of painting.
In Pollock’s work, the unstretched canvas was placed on the floor. The painter moved around it, pouring, dripping, throwing and reworking paint. Gravity, speed, viscosity and the breadth of the body’s movement all took part in the work. The lines do not illustrate movement: they are its trace. Yet the result is not pure abandon. Pollock alternated accident and decision, layering and control. Chance opened possibilities; the artist selected them.
This distinction matters. The myth of the genius seized by an immediate impulse has often obscured the labour, revisions and construction involved. It has also pushed artists such as Lee Krasner and Joan Mitchell into the background, although their works show that gesture may be energetic without being blind, and free without ceasing to be composed.
In Europe: Sign, Speed and Resistance
In Europe, terms multiplied: lyrical abstraction, Art Informel, Tachisme, gestural painting. They overlap in part without being interchangeable. Hans Hartung constructed tensions through scratches, bundles and rapid signs. Georges Mathieu made speed of execution a visible principle. Wols, Jean-Paul Riopelle and Judit Reigl explored other relationships between mark, rhythm and space.
Pierre Soulages requires a particular nuance. His work is often associated with gestural abstraction, but he did not merely seek to record the movement of the hand. He organised relationships between masses, light and tension. Gesture matters, but it is held by structure. This distinction prevents every non-geometric painting from being reduced to an emotional discharge.
Colour Becomes a Space
Alongside action painting, a slower abstraction developed. In Rothko’s work, vast fields of colour seem to advance, recede or dissolve. In Newman’s, an almost uniform expanse is crossed by a vertical band that both separates and connects. The surface appears simple, but this simplicity is not poverty: it shifts attention towards scale, duration, breath and the viewer’s position.
Here, colour is no longer merely a quality applied to a form. It becomes the very medium of the experience. The gaze does not leap from one object to another; it remains, adjusts and perceives variations. The work asks for time. It tells almost nothing, yet changes the way we stand before it.
Material Bears the Trace
In France and Italy, several artists made material a central concern. Jean Fautrier thickened the surface until it acquired an almost bodily density. Jean Dubuffet employed pastes laden with sand, cement, tar, dust or fragments, then scraped them like earth or a wall. Paint ceased to be a transparent skin: it became a ground upon which something was inscribed.
Alberto Burri worked with hessian sacks, stitching, burns, wood, plastic and metal. His works sometimes evoke wounds, sutures or destruction, but Burri often insisted on their formal qualities. We must therefore distinguish what the work makes plausible from what the artist explicitly stated. Material may carry a memory without being confined to a single interpretation.
In Antoni Tàpies’s work, the surface recalls a wall: dust, cracks, incisions, erased signs. Material is no longer merely a means serving an image. Its roughness, weight and resistance directly produce meaning.
The Surface Truly Opens
Lucio Fontana crossed another threshold. From 1948 onwards, he perforated certain canvases; from 1958, he made the slashes that became emblematic of his Concetti spaziali. The gesture may appear destructive, but its purpose was not simply to attack painting. By opening the canvas, Fontana introduced the real space behind it.
The surface was therefore no longer a fictive window or an intact support. It became an object with a front, a reverse, a thickness and a boundary. The cut does not represent emptiness: it gives it a passage. Painting and sculpture began to lose the boundary that had separated them.
Silence Is Not an Absence
As some artists amplified gesture and material, others reduced them. Rothko slowed vision. Newman made elements scarce. Ad Reinhardt pushed painting towards squares so dark that their differences emerged only over time. Soulages, in another way, brought light forth from the relationships between black, surface and gaze.
Visual silence does not therefore mean that nothing is happening. It may be a concentration. The fewer objects a work gives us to recognise, the more sensitive differences become: a boundary, a thickness, an interval, a restrained light. Withdrawal does not abolish presence; it can intensify it.
From Spectacular Gesture to Necessary Gesture
The post-war period has sometimes been told as the triumph of individual freedom: large formats, bodies in motion, material freed from rules. This account contains some truth, but becomes misleading if it confuses freedom with an absence of rigour. A work is not powerful because the gesture is large, rapid or violent. It becomes so when each action truly transforms the relationships on the surface.
A necessary gesture may strike, scratch, pour or cut. It may also remove, space out, cover or wait. What matters is not its theatricality, but its inner necessity: what does it do to material, emptiness, rhythm, light and the body of the person looking?
What Begins to Appear
After 1945, abstraction definitively ceased to be merely a vocabulary of forms. It became a way of engaging the body, allowing materials to act, testing the surface and constructing a presence. The painting was no longer only what one saw; it was what had been made, resisted, crossed and rendered perceptible.
Gesture, material, surface and silence are not four separate territories. They answer one another. Gesture reveals the resistance of material; material gives thickness to the surface; the surface organises emptiness; silence allows these relationships to become perceptible. The work holds when none of these elements merely decorates another.
To be continued — After gesture and material, some artists chose to reduce still further: monochrome, repetition, emptiness, light and space. The next article will explore the moment when removing no longer means impoverishing, but making every difference more decisive.
References and Sources
- Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) — Abstract Expressionism and The Processes and Materials of Abstract Expressionist Painting: the movement’s diversity, action painting, scale, materials and processes.
- Centre Pompidou — Abstractions and Gestural Abstractions after 1945: lyrical abstraction, Art Informel, Hartung, Mathieu, Soulages and transatlantic dialogues.
- The Metropolitan Museum of Art — Entries devoted to Jean Dubuffet’s thick impastos: the use of thick pastes, sand, cement, tar and ordinary materials.
- Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum — Alberto Burri: The Trauma of Painting: sacks, stitching, combustion, metal and the transformation of the pictorial support.
- Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum — Lucio Fontana: Venice/New York: Spatialism, perforations from 1948 and the first slashes from 1958.
- Centre Pompidou — Pierre Soulages — A study of structure, contrasts and forces in a painting that cannot be reduced to the lyricism of gesture.
© 2026 Marie Dernoncourt — touscreateurs.eu — All rights reserved.