For many years now, it has been a commonplace that abstract painting has gone as far as it can go: it has reached its absolute limits. This seems to me a misstatement of the facts: what is most characteristic of the great movements in art is their radicalism, their continual surpassing of their own limits, their effort to approach the absolute, to go beyond the outermost boundaries of art. When that furthest limit has been reached, another painter arrives on the scene, makes the crucial leap, discovers yet another free space beyond, and once again is stopped short by a wall—a wall that he must leap over in order to reach the open spaces beyond. Retreat is impossible. Has abstraction become a new academicism? It does not matter: all movements become formal schools and all styles mere recipes. What is deplorable is to end up being an academic painter; but making academism a steppingstone is not at all to be deplored. The great Baroque and Mannerist painters did not scorn the art of their predecessors; by exaggerating it, they went beyond it. The same thing is true of Symbolist poetry: Symbolist poets did not deny Romanticism; they made it aware of its real nature. After the classicism of the early abstractionists and the romanticism of “abstract expressionism,” what we need is a Mannerism, a Baroque-abstract.

The real danger of sterility confronting abstract painting lies in its pretension that it is a language sufficient unto itself. By the very fact that it pretends to be totally subjective—since it is the individual painter and he alone who creates and uses this language—it lacks an element essential to all language: a system of signs and symbols with meanings shared by all those who use it. If each artist speaks in his own private language, the result is lack of communication, the death of language. A dialogue between schizophrenics. The best abstract painters arrived at a sort of universal language when they rediscovered certain archetypal forms that represent man’s most ancient and most universal heritage. But was it really a language? It was, rather, a pre-language or a meta-language. Abstract painters waver between stammering and mystical illumination. Though they disdain communication, they occasionally contrive to express communion. The opposite is true of poetry: the only thing at a poet’s disposal is words—each of which has a meaning that is the same for everyone—and it is out of these words that he must try to create a new language. The poet’s words continue to be a language, but at the same time they are also something else: poetry, something never before heard, never before expressed, something that is language and goes beyond it. Abstract painting seeks to be a pure pictorial language, and thus attempts to escape the essential impurity of all languages: the recourse to signs or forms that have meanings shared by everyone. It either falls short of language or goes beyond it, resulting either in silence or in onomatopoeic interjection: Mondrian or Pollock. It is an attempt at expression that implicitly denies what it affirms. Therein perhaps lies its possibility of renewing itself: only that creative work which does not deny its own inner contradiction and brings it into the full light of day is capable of revealing its true nature, which is always twofold. If it were to take this contradiction as its point of departure and refuse to conjure it away, abstract painting might go beyond the limits imposed upon it and realize itself by affirming the very thing that denies it. That was the secret of Baroque art and poetry.