CUTTING EDGE ART 'Abstract art versus beauty'. By Charlie Steg

Describing abstract art is a really complex task and can lead us to even more insatiable fields. Undoubtedly, it is the opposite of the figurative and of the representation of recognizable images. Now, is it really aesthetic or beautiful? Below, Hoboken, New Jersey abstract artist Charlie Steg tries to answer some of these questions.

Aesthetics is a branch of philosophy, which studies the essence and perception of beauty, reflects on objects that produce emotions and that lead to value them as beautiful, ugly or sublime. An aesthetic experience is the pleasure, enjoyment, feeling or pleasant emotion that aesthetic objects cause on the senses. Beauty is everything that produces an aesthetic experience in the subject.

Art used to be an imitation of nature or reality. At present, we consider art as the expression of the feelings and emotions experienced by the artist, beyond his fidelity to reality and nature. The feeling that a work of art arouses is a very controversial subject, although a point has not been defined in which the feeling of beauty can be strictly objective or subjective, since it is difficult to expose what a true work of art is.

Classic Beauty

Criticism of the trial is a fundamental work in the history of art, written by Immanuel Kant. In this, he proposes that beauty should refer only to the form and not to the matter, thus in general beauty can be called the expression of aesthetic ideas, beauty is the expression of the form, in a beautiful object it consists of the relationship of the parts that constitute it in a space, either in nature or in the work of art and in a second moment as the expression of the aesthetic ideas that the author embodies in his work.

The form in Kant is what makes the diversity of the same phenomenon can be ordered in certain relationships, thus the form of the object is what is taken into account for the judgment on beauty.

Kandinsky arrives with a definition of beauty practically opposite to that of Kant, the beautiful is no longer what pleases for its form, but the beautiful work of art is the one that more purely manifests a series of emotions, which govern color and to the non-figurative form. Kandinsky tries to go into the non-figurative to achieve the expression of the interior element, this is what beautiful art consists of.

With this tendency to pursue inner beauty, Kandinsky distances himself more and more from any possible representation. He managed to fragment the representation of beautiful art in his works. This new type of beauty clearly emerges from the category of the sublime, while the category of beauty is relegated to the past.

The fact that Duchamp titled it, signed it, and presented it for an exhibition stripped the object of its urinal function and turned it into a work of art. In contemporary art we find a concept of beauty that ridicules the ideal of previous centuries, it is intended to show the beautiful in confrontation with the ugly, the practical against the artistic or the vulgar against the cultured. However, beauty does not fade, it jumps from art to advertising, fashion, design and day to day.

Current art does not have to follow the concept of beauty that was taken as a reference throughout the history of art, it is the artist who chooses. The artist can make a beautiful work in his own way, if that is his intention or desire, but it is no longer an obligation. Beauty does not die in contemporary art from a subjective point of view, in which there are subjects who appreciate the work itself as beautiful, and are capable of understanding the abstraction that it entails, that is, its meaning.

Kooning is one of the most representative painters of Abstract Expressionism. His style is framed within action painting, a technique that consists of impulsively throwing the paint onto the canvas. Among the chaotic abstraction generated by his brush, we can recognize some figurative elements that make the painting's background obvious. It is the beginning of a series of grotesque and fierce women who denote adoration for women and at the same time transmit the force of feminine power. Thanks to this, it is considered one of the most important representations of women in the entire history of painting.

This uninhibited-looking painting, which appears to have been painted by Kooning in one day, actually spent two years doing countless preliminary studies and repainting it over and over again.

Art is not identified with natural reality but with an imaginative reality, that is, with the idea and the mental image that the artist and the viewer make for themselves. Beauty is expressing the inner element without being determined by a concept. The overflow of the imagination is exhibited, of the feelings awakened by the sensation of the own infinity. The sublime runs through modern art.