ARTICLE 5 — EXPLORING ABSTRACTION
What happens when the frame is no longer enough?
A study by Marie Dernoncourt — 2026
For decades, abstraction had transformed what could appear on a canvas. It had liberated colour, fragmented form, asserted gesture, explored material, and at times chosen silence and subtraction.
Yet the support remained.
A rectangle hanging on the wall.
Gradually, some artists began to ask another question: Why should the work stop at its edges?
Piercing the Surface
With Lucio Fontana, this question becomes almost literal.
From 1949 onwards, he punctured his surfaces. By the late 1950s, his celebrated slashes opened up the picture plane even more radically. The gesture may seem destructive; within his enquiry, however, it sought to move beyond the flat surface and bring real space into the work.
The canvas is no longer merely a place on which to represent something. It becomes a boundary that can be crossed.
Behind it lies air. There is real depth.
The painting begins to open onto the world.
Space Becomes Material
In the 1960s, other artists shifted this boundary further still.
Donald Judd gradually abandoned painting for three-dimensional forms that occupy what he called real space. His works no longer represent a space: they inhabit it. The intervals, distances and emptiness between the elements become as decisive as the volumes themselves.
It is a considerable shift.
The work is no longer merely the object. It also becomes the relationship between the object, the wall, the floor, the light and the person moving before it.
Emptiness then ceases to be what is missing.
It becomes what connects.
Entering the Work
With Yayoi Kusama, a further step is taken.
In 1965, her first Infinity Mirror Room transformed the repetition developed in her paintings, drawings and accumulations into a spatial experience. The mirrors multiply the space and incorporate the visitor’s presence within the work itself.
We no longer remain in front of it.
We enter.
The viewer becomes presence, reflection and movement.
A question then arises: if the work changes as I move within it, can I still completely separate the work from the person looking at it?
When Almost Nothing Remains
With James Turrell, the object can almost disappear.
Since the 1960s, he has worked with light, colour, architecture and perception. Some installations give us very little object to look at; instead, they place us in a situation in which we become aware of our own way of seeing.
In Turrell’s work, light no longer merely illuminates the work.
Light is the work.
And the viewer is no longer entirely outside it. The experience shifts towards perception itself: seeing also becomes an awareness that one is in the act of seeing.
Where Does the Work End?
We began with a canvas.
Then we pierced its surface.
We occupied the wall, the floor and the space.
We entered the installation.
And finally, something shifted into our very perception.
And so a strange question remains: where does a work truly end?
At the edge of the material?
In the space around it?
In the body that moves through it?
Or in what continues to resonate after we have left the room?
Perhaps this is one of the most profound shifts achieved by abstraction: it did not merely change what we look at.
It changed the place from which we look.
Bridge to “Art & Thought”
This fifth instalment deliberately stops here. The question “Where does the work end?” may then open onto a more personal branch: the philosophy of creation, perception, silence and material, beginning with Marie’s works.
References and Sources
- Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) — Lucio Fontana, Spatial Concept (Concetto spaziale) puncturing the surface, real space and moving beyond the picture plane.
- Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) — Donald Judd three-dimensional works, intervals and “real space”.
- Hirshhorn Museum — Smithsonian — Yayoi Kusama, Infinity Mirror Rooms repetition, immersive space and the visitor’s presence.
- Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum — James Turrell perception, light, colour and space.
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