This is Part 2 of a two-part essay. Read the previous part here.

II. Shape

Figuration is a form of speech but “the shape of shape”[1] is a silence, an abstract painter’s punctuation for reflection; stiff, solid, delicate, and indefinite; an offering of space for the unarticulated bodies of historically underrepresented form. A synchronous occupation of multiple terrains; shape is full with “quantized indeterminacies:”[2] emptiness, and void. Shape is an ever-expanding inconsistency of associations; a simultaneity of faces and spheres. A singular yet archetypical gesture of emotion, a contour, and a dimension in motion. A shape radiates exquisite rage and fear, disquiet, and delight. It is the face of chaos, a virtual trace. Stoic, yet never fixed, shape is a transfiguration; a protrusion and collapsing of configuration; a constellation of colour, planes, and positionality; a chimera of absolute definition in an ever-unfolding state of exception.

Shape is the holding of tension between friend and foe, a temporal surface and substance of ebb and flow; non-talk, “unthought,”[3] a contesting of the logic of chronological time.[4] Shape flattens observation into a plane of smooth space, animating the possibilities of an excess of form, an accumulation of forces, a strange topology in flux. Shape is a carrier of opinions and feelings, indifferent of their texture, colour, and tone. It is a suspension of stance to hold a spot for variation, mutation, and change. Shape flickers the unresolved emergence of matter, an architectural intensity of internal and external fluctuations, a reaction of the intra-action of objects in space.

Everything that exceeds representation is a shape and a shape is the delineation of everything representable. It is a border line of difference, texture, colour, and tone that is a surface façade of the most enigmatic matter, an active ambiguity of anchored physicality.

Fig 2. Varying layers of translucent and opaque paint infer depth and distance. The colours are contingent upon one another; their temperature and configuration are each independent bodies but intra-act to suggest atmospheric space. Glacial-like figures emerge as cut-outs against the ground, composed as a plurality of contingencies–an autopoietic force that is the face of a vacillating system. Positive/negative, warm/cold, full/empty, tangible yet formless. These sequences of shapes do not resolve into anything distinct but quietly point to an iteratively constituting presence.

III. Line

A line is a punctuation between light and shadow, the division between wakefulness and sleep, an expanse of fracturing planes, an uneven topology of exterior façades, the flow of water, a break in the ice, an advancing coast, an intersection of decomposition and regeneration. A line is the delicate containment of life, a registering pulse, a walking path for bodies, eyes, and hands in the dark, the bones of drawing,[5] the architecture of thought–a habit, a direction, a pattern of behavior.

A line is a sentence, a circumference, a shifting cartography of imperial control. Animated by elation and fatigue, lines are the expansion and contraction of skin–a scratch, a stretchmark, a tear, the folding of inside and out, a mobius strip. A line is the crossing of territories, and personal boundaries, the persistent impression of both stop and space between bodies and things unsettled yet bound together in an uneven distribution of form. It encloses possibilities of perception, refining objects of attention to singular positions of fact, but this line of thought is porose–malleable and inconclusive. It is a sociogenic trace[6] of enclosure that is historically drawn, a fiction systemic yet radically contingent to differentiation, mutation, and dissent.

Fig. 3. A line in painting is simultaneously a colour, a texture, and a tone; it is the scaffolding of form, a division between positive and negative, light and dark, cool and warm. At one scale a line is a border, but at another scale a line is a field–open to vast microbial networks, chemicals, UV rays, words, and shadows. A line is never only a line, it is a manifold event–a ripple of relations across a field in flux.