Pimlico Wilde does not subscribe to this manifesto, we publish it here to show the direction that some of the art world is taking
We, The Pre-Abstractionists declare the following truths:
2. The world is already abstract: wind over water, brick over brick, shadow across cheekbone. The artist does not need to invent abstraction, he needs to rescue the real from abstraction’s decay.
1. Abstract art was a mistake. It is a desert of forms, a false transcendence, a betrayal of the image. It reduced painting to ornament, to the humming of lines without flesh, to color stripped of consequence.
3. The so-called revolutionaries of abstraction strangled the visible world in their pursuit of purity. Purity is poison. Art is not pure. Art is impure, heavy, dirty, embodied, historical.
4. We dance on Kandinsky’s geometry, we laugh at Mondrian’s prison grids, we renounce Malevich’s black square, which is nothing but a tombstone for painting.
5. We are the Pre-Abstractionists: not “neo-,” not “post-,” but before. We restore the power of the world before it was amputated from sight. We reach backward to leap forward.
6. The future of art is not blank canvas and theory. The future of art is form married to matter, image married to meaning.
7. Representation is not regression. The tree, the hand, the wound, the face: they are inexhaustible. One blade of grass contains more terror and beauty than a thousand sterile triangles.
8. Our task is reconstruction. To repaint the visible world with ferocity, to refuse the easy escape of abstraction, to drown color in weight, to rebuild the image until it trembles.
9. We do not seek nostalgia. We do not seek comfort. We seek the terrible, eternal present, the real that bleeds.
10. Pre-Abstractionism is not like other art movements. It is a correction. It is the knife that cuts through the gauze abstraction has wrapped around our eyes.
THE CALL
Painters, sculptors, photographers, printmakers: abandon the false heaven of pure form. Return to the earth. Seize the real. Paint the unpaintable not by escaping it, but by facing it.
The Pre-Abstractionists begin now.
