What I Did Not See at BAF

I went to British Art Fair looking at abstracts and found myself repeatedly stopping in front of things that weren’t quite that. My favourite was John Monks’ Ambience. The room is there, but it’s hard to make out the details. Space, furniture and light all seem to dissolve into paint, leaving enough of it visible, yet distorted. Then there was Dia Al-Azzawi’s Man in a Yellow Field, where the figure remains, but colour and form have taken over much of the work of description.

There were more and walking through the fair, I became increasingly aware of how little completely non-referential abstraction I was seeing. Instead, reality kept appearing as a starting point, then being pushed, distorted or stripped back.

Perhaps that caught my attention because I work in the opposite direction. With aphantasia, there is no internal image for me to begin with. My paintings start with colour, pressure, line and structure rather than something seen.

So I left thinking less about the old abstract-versus-figurative divide, and more about the territory between them. How much reality does a painting need before we start supplying the rest ourselves?