This is Part 1 of a two-part essay. Read the next part here.

A line is simultaneously a colour, a texture, and a tone: It is the abutting edge of positive and negative; the touching point of autonomous bodies.[1] Following posthumanist scholars such as Sylvia Wynter and Karen Barad, this essay employs a collection of aesthetic insights on form, gathered in an abstract painter’s studio, and applies them towards a methodology of aesthetic criticality; i.e., care/full looking. This aesthetic criticality traces the contingency of formal relationships so that a more robust “ethico-onto-epistemology”[2] emerges: One that displays the entanglement of matter as it materializes and “intra-acts”[3] with other bodies.

Pressed to visualize the contours of an ethico-onto-epistemology is to live and tell a story of living as a set of relations. This is a story that interrupts the narrative of my own exceptionalism. It is a story that emerges by way of lines to paper, paint to canvas; an exodus of the everyday that is not an escape but a concentration of care. Through aesthetic criticality, an abstract painter’s practice of care/full looking produces questions of self and other; where the queerness of form itself is revealed as a shapeshifter, a chimeric force of multiple worlds. Colour appears ever fugitive, vacillating as an illumination of shapes, which are delineated by an architecture of line invariably solid, yet unstable. The foundations of composition disclose an indeterminacy, non-conforming in their facticity; colours, shapes, and lines are a theatre of relations that form and inform on a knot of topography in formation. To see the peculiarity of form, with aesthetic criticality, is to note the dissolving border between self and other; figure and ground. Form reconceptualised as iteratively constituted is an ethic-onto-epistemological position on matter that axiomatically establishes an ethical entanglement between being and knowing.

I. Colour

Colour is biologically and socially constituting – a matter of perspective, stable and symbolic, concrete, associative, and transparent; a mirage of micro expressions and macro aggressions, of nuance and void, an economy of taste–both toxic and intoxicating, a resource for capital and control, light and dark, cool and warm, a division of boundaries in the service of form. Colour is the advancing and receding of atmospheric lines of sight and its ever-increasing absence is the technophilic capture of all the wavelengths of light. It maintains implicit and explicit relationships, simultaneously translucent and opaque. Hue is an “existence without standing:”[4] wavering between loud and nuanced, tangible and sensed. It is the oscillation, absorption, and differentiation of light.

Two pieces of paper overlap; one Cobalt blue, the other a Cerulean hue. Two bodies touching; their boundaries of colour inform one another. The attraction and repulsion of analogous blues, of varying temperatures and intensities, imply depth and distance. This “push-pull”[5] of pictorial space, a founding tenet of modernist abstraction, is not a modernist reduction, but a metaphysics of interconnectedness that produce emergent forms.[6]

“Colour is relational,”[7] declares contemporary abstract painter Amy Sillman, and these chromatic relationships, fluctuations of form, are primary sources for re-storying[8] the world. To re-imagine form as an ever-forming, collectively constituting entanglement is an undoing of the human; unsettling our position at the center, or with a center, from which to establish single stories of origin that articulate and mark the stakes of (human and non-human) freedoms[9]. To see colour collectively constituting is a perceptual shift that gives space to re-imagine western narratives of bodies, borders, and beings and is to tune our critical perception towards not only a relational (rather than static) conception of form, but likewise, towards the relationality within and between social, political, and ecological bodies.

Fig. 1. An “assemblage” of painterly techniques unfolds and folds together in a display of shifting meaning, never “closed or sovereign,”[10]  but as an array of vibrating matter. Through the intra-action of varying colours, a hybrid form emerges. Delicately held together through its “component parts,” each part of the composition illuminates the next: A ripple of relations informs a dynamic whole. To look at colour with aesthetic criticality is to perceive the undulating, rather than static, nature of materiality itself, giving us a toolkit[11] for a posthumanist paradigm; an attentional prosthesis for critical perception: A sharpening of senses as the arming of oneself against a brutally insensitive present.[12]

You can read the next part of this essay here.